Openmind 2008: Kesäkoodi project Moodle Quiz UI for building quizzes in YouTube
See also the most current demo at http://www.pilpi.net/software/moodle_quiz_ui/demo/
Username: demo
Password: demo
Screenshots of current state:
A month has passed in Metz, France. I have had progress with the Quiz UI also, lots of discussion has taken place and I have many ideas for the forthcoming thesis. Some serious bugs have been fixed and what is left - in addition to integrating everything in Moodle 2.0 - has been gathered into one development document in the docs.
Openmind is approaching and I will take part via a Youtube video, since it is hard to participate otherwise from another country. I will post the link to the video here as soon as it is public.
August has passed, but work continues. I am leaving for Metz, France tomorrow to live there for 9 to 10 months, and the Kesäkoodi final report for the project will have to wait at least for some days - we will see about how easy it will be to get an Internet connection. At least there’s wifi on the campus, I hear.
The usability report of Moodle Quiz UI’s direction in the future has not gotten any discussion. I only mentioned it in one forum posting though so that is understandable. I will have to promote it further once I have time again, to really get the community thinking about the issues that came up in the usability testing, which were, after all, rather primitive.
This software did benefit from this summer’s work, but it is far from good in terms of usability yet.
Last Saturday, I published the results of the usability testing in Kuopio in the newfound Quiz Usability portal. It is quite an extensive bunch of documents so there have not been too many comments about it yet. We also got into discussions with Tim Hunt last week and he requested further comments from the community about including it in Moodle 2.0.
I went to Kuopio on Tuesday, and during Wednesday and Thursday ran usability tests with 7 participants in total. I am in the process of making conclusions from the results, and will publish the results and an executive summary in the Docs as soon as possible.
After making the changes to the UI suggested by the testing, the official Kesäkoodi portion of the project is starting to be done and successful.
Then, there are still some finishing touches the application needs (CSS for IE and other browsers, further tooltips, question bank integration controls, further feedback for different editing operations), but those will be completed during and after September. Also, much integration work - moving CSS to Moodle 2.0 themes, discussion about the general library changes I have made - will need to take place as soon as Tim Hunt, the Quiz coordinator gets settled in to Moodle HQ (Perth, Australia) where he has recently moved.
The community feedback has been good, and Moodle 2.0 launch is planned for the end of the year (last time I heard). I will probably be participating in Openmind 2008 to present the results of this project via video conferencing from France.
From the forums:
The reorder tab is now functionally complete: Even though the repaginating is hidden, it also works ok server-side, but as I am making it an YUI dialog, that dialog is still missing.
There is a lot to discuss still, especially code-wise but also in terms of the UI, but it works now pretty well. Please test it out, and try to break it so we can iron bugs out at this point.
A particular question is whether sending questions to a specific pages should be a separate input field/submit button pair, at this point it is combined with “reorder questions” submit button, which also reorders the questions according to the numbering the user has given.
Also, 6 test subjects have been confirmed from the University of Kuopio to participate in tests next week, on Wednesday and Thursday. :)
Just published the current version with a reordering tab pretty finished HTML/CSS-wise (which, again, was surprisingly lot of work) but not much functionality there yet.
As a result of a change of plans, I started to implement the reordering tab last week. That is: I decided to implement all the functionality before doing usability testing with the actual application. This was due to the fact that it was not easy enough to get teachers as usability test subjects during July. Instead of hunting, I decided to put my energy into implementation.
Thus, the question ordering/paging tab is well underway and will, if all goes well, be finished by next week.
The feedback from the Moodle community about the demo published last week has been very positive, though I have gotten some very interesting development ideas, too. So that is something to be glad about! :)
This week:
Published the demo version of the new UI yesterday (link: no user id? login as guest). Today I tested it with IE and the issues seemed less catastrofic than I expected. YUI javascript stuff does not work in IE yet, though.
The page layout and the single questions look like they are supposed to now. CSS took more time that I expected it to. Random question layout (+listing of the questions of the category in the random question box) and question bank layout are still unimplemented, which translates to being just about one week behind schedule.
Turns out that in Finland everybody (teachers) is still on holiday next week anyway so arranging usability testing would probably not have been easy, anyway.
