Facilitating sharing quizzes

[EJMFarrow]

The idea of all this is to help people share questions. Realistically, though, our most useful amount of data for sharing is a quiz. A quiz should be structured to progressively test/ teach students.

How do we combine making sharing quizzes easier with version control?

Version control (realistically) requires a separate file for each question. How do we combine questions and import them as a quiz?

Do we need quiz-level manifest files? Do we have a repo for each quiz (but that leads to duplication issues)? We need an add tag/category option on import.

[anst-i]

In Moodle, activities can already be backed up and restored.

This includes quizzes and also takes care of the used questions.

From this point of view, I don't think this project should aim at doing things on the quiz/activity level and just work with the question bank.

[sangwinc]

Thanks @anst-i. Yes, the question banks will be the starting point, and the most important use-case.

For things like the HELM project, it will be useful to hold quiz information, especially for an initial import of questions. There is considerable value in the order of questions and where a colleague has carefully designed question order within a quiz. E.g. information (description items) immediately followed by relevant questions. Items in isolation will make a lot less sense.

Anyway, this is later down the the project track.

Chris

[aharjula]

Storing separate manifest files for quizzes seems to be the sanest thing to me. If we place every question into its own file in the git-directory structure (again, the sanest thing to me), then a quiz is just an ordered set of those files and possibly some metadata needed to match Moodle (or any other VLE) quiz settings, layout and point weights.

I would also store those questions into a nested directory hierarchy that would map to the category hierarchy of Moodle etc... Being able to import such a category structure is also important, it really irks me to receive a flat dump of hundreds of questions without any categorisation. Categories will also need some metadata, i.e. it is unlikely that the directory name is enough as categories might need to have some descriptions, and identifiers so that mapping them over to matching ones is simpler, so probably a category metadata file in each directory and so on.

[EJMFarrow]

Thanks, @aharjula - that all makes sense.

Turns out IDEMS relies on tags rather than categories for their question banks so I'll have to think if there's anything useful in terms of directory structure we can do for them.