MoodleMoot UK and Ireland 2017 proved to be another well organised conference, with a few of us from the E-Learning Unit and from IT-Services able to attend to learn what can be expected from future versions of Moodle (which is what we use for QMplus), plus what developments have been carried out by other institutions. This year I was particularly interested in pedagogies and best practice, presented by other universities and I was able to attend a couple of sessions which looked at creating engaging quizzes and students’ engagement with them.

The Open University gave a great talk on their experience of ‘what makes a good Moodle quiz?’ giving insight into the processes involved, questions which the course convenors/teachers should be asking themselves and suggesting best practice.

Dr Tim Hunt and Chris Nelson highlighted the following questions that need to be answered when looking to create a quiz:

• What is the quiz trying to achieve?
• Which question types should be used?
• Should multiple attempts be allowed?
• Should feedback be deferred?

After identifying what was hoped to be achieved through answering these questions, the following best practice guidelines were decided upon to try to: ensure that students knew why why the quiz was being used and to test what, to try to ensure that there were as few issues as possible and so that any problems were easily resolved. These guidelines were communicated to students in advance and then used, reviewed and improved upon each time:

• The availability of the quiz (open and close times)
• It’s learning objectives
• What topics are to be covered?
• How will the quiz behave? (for example,whether students will receive the same questions as their peers or a set of questions from a bank of questions)
• When they will receive feedback, plus in what format?
• What happens after the the quiz has taken place?
• What to do if there’s a problem?

The creation of quizzes was standardised through the use of a workflow to ensure that the questions were suitable and met the learning objectives:

The academics identified a few limitations to creating banks of quality questions for quizzes however:

• Difficult to devise good quality questions, particularly in volume
• Proof reading proved required resource
• Some question types are particularly hard to create

So in response to this, students were requested to to create questions, using templates, for which they were assessed for the quality and quantity composed. The students’ questions were then rated, to prevent them from being rewarded for creating large numbers of poor quality questions and the best ones were then picked out for use elsewhere, with them being shared between courses and categorised into the various difficulty levels. This idea really appealed to me, with students learning about the subject matter during the process of creating quiz questions, plus contributing to a learning resource at the same time, in a manner which could be assessed in either a formative or summative manner.

Hibernia College Dublin noted however, that high volume quiz use not necessarily ensures student engagement, with them researching student interaction with formative quizzes. They noted that as more (formative) quizzes were attempted, student engagement decreased – but also interestingly that engagement was greater if the availability of the activity was limited with the use of a hard deadline.

These hypotheses although thought provoking, may need researching further to determine whether there are other factors to be considered, such as:

• Student ability
• Subject matter
• Quiz question type
• The need for further quiz assessments
• Course design