Enovation Solutions

I am a massive fan of Moodle Quiz. It really is one of the most powerful and comprehensive pedagogical tools in Moodle. From its multiple question types (http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/Question_types) to its many configuration and grading options, its various methods of giving students targeted feedback and its comprehensive reporting, it leaves most other quiz engines in the shade.

Reporting is one of Moodle Quizzes biggest strengths and an aspect of the quiz that I think people overlook. Today I want to take some timeout just to do some justice to Moodle quiz and share with the world just how fantastic it is.

Very generally there are two types of reports that can be generated for Moodle quizzes, student report and statistics report. Lets look at each of these reports in a little detail.

Student Report

The student report (grades) allows the teacher to see how students are performing in the quiz. The student report allows the teacher to see at a glance averages for questions and students but also allows the teacher to drill down to individual students to individual question and view a log for a student’s behaviour in a given question.

The screen shot below demonstrates a simple example of how summative information for a quiz is displayed.

Grade report for Moodle Quiz

For a teacher to review an individual learners attempt he or she just needs to click on one of the marks. This will bring up the question and outline the students response to the question including a log of what the student did while answering the question.

Question level logs

Teachers need to not only know how their students are performing but they also need to know how well their quizzes are performing. Moodle provides a “statistics” report providing basic psychometric analysis of quizzes to do this.

Statistics Report

The statistics report is broken into two parts; quiz information, which provides summative stats on the quiz, and quiz structure analysis, which provides detailed information about the quiz’s questions.

Quiz information contains the following information about a given quiz:

• Quiz name
• Course name
• Open and close dates for the quiz
• Total number of first/graded attempts
• Average grade for first/all attempts
• Median grade
• Standard deviation of grades
• Score distribution skewness (for first attempts) – indicating whether there is a long tail on the distribution curve to the left (negative skew) or right (positive skew)
• Coefficient of internal consistency (sometimes called Cronbach Alpha) – This is a measure of whether all the items in the quiz are testing basically the same thing. Thus it measures the consistency of the text, which is a lower bound for the validity. Higher numbers here are better [1].
• Error ratio – the variation in the grades comes from two sources. First some students are better than others at what is being tested, and second there is some random variation. We hope that the quiz grades will largely be determined by the student’s ability, and that random variation will be minimised. The error ratio estimates how much of the variation is random, and so lower is better [1].
• Standard error – this is derived from the error ratio, and is a measure of how much random variation there is in each test grade. So, if the Standard error is 10%, and a student scored 60%, then their real ability probably lies somewhere between 50% and 70% [1].

First of all – Federated Moodle Management – what does that even mean?
This is where an entity (regional organisations or perhaps umbrella groups) require the ability to self provision multiple Moodle instances for each of their member organisations, while at the same time retaining the services of a professional external provider to manage and maintain the service. These umbrella organisations may want to retain a supervisory role over the spawned instances (very often keeping full admin control) while letting the member organisations create the content and look after enrolments among their learners. New courses, can be created locally or pushed from the central organisation using a course hub for all to use. New functional components can be added or removed by the umbrella organisation. On top of all this there is a need for reporting across all sites and perhaps the ability to turn off sites and functionality on a case by case basis. The diagram below outlines how Federated Moodle Management works.

Federated Moodle Management architectural diagram

Enovation have built up considerable expertise in the managed hosting of Moodle implementations in a diverse infrastructure – shared physical and virtual servers, dedicated physical and virtual environments. Harnessing this expertise we have built an open source stack to create an environment where these umbrella organisations can be empowered to control the generation/deletion and updating of Moodle instances for member organisations.

What are its benefits?
The Centralised management solution offers:
- A Simple interface for package (could be a custom Moodle) creation – allowing a premade custom package to be deployed together with selected add-ons
- Facilitate billing of member oganisations
- Automated package upgrades
- Ability to turn on/off sites
- Ability to turn on/off components within these sites (eg additional Moodle modules, or additional packages – mahara)

Who is using this?
The Irish Computer Society (ICS) is one organisation who are using this solution as part of their ICSGrid. ICS have the ability to fully manage all their member schools using an interface provided by Enovation. In the background Enovation manage the infrastructure and maintain the packages, and ensure that all instances are up to date and running correctly.

If you would like to see a demo of Federated Moodle Management – just give us a shout!

Moodle 2 has a great new feature called conditional activities.  This allows you define an activity which must be completed prior to a student being allowed access to another activity. You won’t see the conditional activity options as standard, you first have to enabled them at site, course, or activity level.

The assumption people have when they read about this is that it can work on a course level. Users would like to define a course which must be completed before a student can enter another course. When you go looking for this you find a feature which you would expect does exactly what you are looking for, but it works a different way.

The way it works as standard in Moodle (2.0.3+) is that when a teacher sets up courses A and B, such that course A is a prerequisite to course B, the student can have access to both courses A and B – and access is not restricted to B but rather, in the completion process, course B cannot be marked as completed by the student unless course A is completed.

You could consider the term prerequisite has been used confusingly in this scenario because it doesn’t function as a prerequisite to access a course as access but a prerequisite to completion of a course.

One way to implement a feature which does prevent access to course B until course A is completed would be to add new course settings which are similar to the conditional activity settings for activities.  You could then define a prerequisite course which should be completed before entry to the course would be permitted.

You would then need to modify the course login process to check if the student has met the prerequisite course requirements, and alert them if they are prevented access to the course.  Simple!

I have created a proof of concept implementation which is made up of some new core files (a core lib file and language file), a new block and patches to lib/moodlelib.php, course/lib.php & course/edit_form.php

I have tried to keep the patches to a minimum, so each patch is only a few lines long.  This code requires a new databases table but I didn’t want to patch the Moodle database scripts, so instead the block will handle the creation of the database table.

You can download a version of Moodle 2 with course prerequisites from our git repositories at:

https://github.com/enovation/moodle (you can clone git://github.com/enovation/moodle.git)

(The branch with the course prerequisite code is called course_prerequisites)

A lot of people find the calendar tool in Moodle very useful. It is a really simple way for learners, teachers and site administrators to schedule learning and training events. More details on the Moodle calendar and its uses can be found on the Moodle docs page – http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/Calendar

Okay so Moodle calendar is great but I can hear what your saying – “Ahhhh, not another calendar to keep track of!” I feel your pain so in this blog post I am going to concentrate on getting your events out of Moodle and into your Outlook or Google calendar and keeping them up to date with your Moodle Calendar.

First of all we need to find out how to get our calendar data out of moodle. To do this we can expose the Moodle calendar to the web. What this basically gives us is a URL for your calendar. The URL opens a file that is in the ICS standard which is a standard way of expressing calendar data. Now lets look at how to export your calendar in Moodle.

1. Open up your calendar as outlined below

   

2. Click on the “Export Calendar” button. This will bring up a screen as outlined below

   

3. Select the options you want and then click on “Get Calendar URL”. The URL generated is your calendar’s URL. If you open this in a web browser it will open an ICS file – this is a text file which tells another calendar program about the events in your Moodle calendar.

Next you will want to import the calendar into your own calendar system. First I will look at Microsoft Outlook and then Google Calendar.

Microsoft Outlook

1. Go to Tools > Account Settings
2. Click on the Internet Calendars tab
3. Click on “Add” and enter the Moodle calendar URL.
   

   Add Outlook Calendar

4. Add details about the calendar
5. You will then see your moodle calendar as an other calendar. Opening it will allow you see your Moodle calendar side-by-side with your Outlook calendar.
   

   Moodle and Outlook Side-by-Side




Google Calendar

In Google Calendar click in the Other Calendars section click on add > add by url

Google Calendar Add by URL

Add the Moodle URL into the pop-up box

Adding URL to Google

Google Calendar

Note: It may take a little while for your calendar to update. Google calendar for example can take a number of hours to show updates done in your Moodle calendar.

The first time I came across the game module in Moodle I couldn’t but wonder what this could be about. It aroused my curiosity and interest that I spent the entire day digging into its uses and features.

What is this game module all about? Well, it is an activity in Moodle which can be added to a course. The game module repackages questions, quiz and glossary in a more interesting and appealing way to students.

The game module comprises of 8 games in all and the game choice can be selected at the point of adding it to a course as an activity depending on the users choice of either questions, quiz or glossary. The game module is designed such that each game works with a specific activity of either quiz, question or glossary.

It consists of favourites such as Snakes and Ladders, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Sudoku, Hangman, Crossword, Cryptex, Hidden Picture and questions from books.

Each of these games are a mirror of the real life game. For instance, with the Snakes and Ladder game, a question is displayed to the student which if answered correctly, displays a number on the dice, then game piece moves up the number displayed on the dice.

The hidden picture game uncovers each piece of a picture for each question correctly answered by the student. Each number in the hidden picture game displays a question to the student such that when the student answers the question correctly, the number is uncovered to display a piece of the picture.

The game “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” is again a mirror of the real life game. A question is displayed to the student which if answered correctly moves up to the next number in the game until the user has completed the questions. If a question is answered incorrectly, the game is over.

A teacher who wishes to ignite the interest of their students in their lectures could, at the end of the lecture use either of the games mentioned above to check the level of  understanding of his students. As this is a much better way of presenting quiz, questions or glossaries to students because it gives the student the opportunity of exercising their knowledge of the lecture and at the same time getting entertained which of course is the purpose of a game.

It is valuable to create an interesting environment for students which in a way keeps them looking forward to lecture thus arousing their interest in the course. Making learning fun motivates students and helps them pay attention and stay focused on the subject.The game module is a great incentive for this purpose.

This reminds me of a lecturer of mine in college whose lecture I always looked forward to because unlike other lecturers, at the end of his class something interesting usually happened.

Lastly, game module is also used in assistive technology helping children with disability learn better because modeling an activity is very helpful.

In conclusion, the game module is an excellent module which every teacher should be encouraged to use. From the students perspective they get to exercise their knowledge of the lecture via the use of a quiz packaged game.  It is a very easy to use module for both the teachers and students and importantly it is a module that has found great use amongst teachers working with children that have special needs. This very important point is something that we will go into in much greater depth in a future post.

Until then, enjoying gaming