2. Issues of Quiz, which will be addressed

See also: Presentation about the core ideas (ODT Impress 202kb)

Intro | Basic issues | Solutions

Moodle Quiz

The Quiz activity module allows the teacher to design and set quizzes consisting of a large variety of Question types, among them multiple choice, true-false, and short answer questions. These questions are kept in the course Question bank and can be re-used within courses and between courses. Quizzes can allow multiple attempts. Each attempt is automatically marked, and the teacher can choose whether to give feedback and/or show the correct answers. -Moodle Docs page for Quiz

The Quiz module is, in other words, intended for building quizzes/exams/tests. As the tool has been built for many kinds of quiz building, there are also several different use cases even for just building a quiz. Eventually, the quizes built will be used by students, but since this project has to do with enabling teachers create the same kind kind of content they can use the old UI for, the UI for actually taking the exams is not a focus of this project.

The issue

The goals of a teacher building a quiz are twofold: creating a quiz and organizing and managing the content, the questions themselves, in categories, are the main related use cases. These use cases are separate, but still closely related. A teacher may have the questions ready in a file format they can import to quiz. On the other hand, he/she may want to just create a quiz, disregarding organizing the questions. The latter is the use case most seriously neglected by the current UI. Such users are also the main target group of the UI proposed here. Any combination of the two use cases is possible and expected, however.

A teacher may or may not want to enter question metadata (such as categories) into the application, depending on:

  • their confidence (experience) with Moodle or computers in general
  • the amount of time available: in a situation where a teacher only has the questions on paper or in some other application and they need to get the exam to the student in 15 minutes; of course if selecting an existing category is 1-2 obvious clicks and/or the teacher already knows clearly what the new categories need to be, this might still be possible.
  • what they perceive feasible in the application’s user interface.

It is also possible that the teacher imports the data from another application, and in this case the metadata may come with the questions; the questions will be in categories in the application after importing.

Most of all, I disagree with comments that we simply need better documentation for the quiz as a solution. Documentation is fine, but the interface should not require any reading in order for a new teacher to make a quiz. I have taught numerous teachers how to make a quiz in Moodle 1.3–1.7, and they are invariably confused unless I walk them step by step for over an hour. That should not be necessary. -Don Hinkelman in the discussions about the UI

During the planning and the development of the Electronic Exam System it became apparent that the user interface of Moodle’s Quiz module suffers from several basic, fundamental usability issues. Especially the UI for creating new quizzes and later, managing them, proved problematic. As a result, teachers wishing to provide quizzes to students often send the data (quiz questions etc.) to IT support, who use the UI for them (!). This is the case in the University of Tampere currently, and as noted by users worldwide in the Moodle forums, we seem to not be an exception.

Many of these issues are such that they can be taken into account simply by taking a proven user-centric approach to the development. Namely, gathering scenarios, investigating the use cases and applying well-known heuristics, as well as doing usability testing of representative users have resulted in the new prototypes. The main guiding principle of the new UI is to allow users to focus more directly on the actual content they manipulate, as opposed to the application logic centric approach taken by the current UI.

The situation with the current Quiz user interface is as follows: novice users aiming to create quizzes from scratch are overwhelmed by the amount of options the UI provides and have a very steep learning curve. The situation is worsened by the fact that the many aspects (categories, random questions) of the actual data model the user is supposed to manipulate are actually not communicated to the user at all by the current UI.

What can we do? See Summary of Solutions