Conditional Quiz Questions. Very exciting! This week I have the pleasure of sitting in on Shane Elliott running the Pukunui Course Creator two day training. It’s always great to see the Pukunui team presenting our standard courses, as we all have our unique flourishes, pet peeves and passions that we focus on.
This morning we’ve been looking at Quiz, after a brief tour of Lesson yesterday afternoon, which resulted in me making the passing comment “Shame we can’t do conditional questions in Quiz like we can in Lesson.”
Shane did a double take. Because as it turns out, as of 2.9 you CAN do conditional quiz questions!!
Now I pride myself on checking out the new features in each version as they come out, but this is a significant one I had missed. With mounting excitement, I read through the forums on Moodle. There is an especially helpful post from the wonderful Mary Cooch here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=313866
You can try it out from a student perspective here: https://school.demo.moodle.net/mod/quiz/view.php?id=757 (the fantastic Mt Orange Schools Demo Site, provided by Moodle HQ).
And you can read up on the documentation over here:
https://docs.moodle.org/29/en/Building_Quiz#Making_questions_conditional_upon_other_questions
So what does this mean for Lesson?
Well, you can now create branching question paths within a Quiz. As always, it pays to plan them ahead before jumping in and building – but Lesson still has a place. Students cannot choose their own path through a quiz, but you can allow them to pick their own way through a Lesson.
Using a Description question type in Quiz, you could provide students with information, followed by review questions. You can then follow with a challenge or remedial questions depending on student answers to conditional questions.
Compare this to Lesson, where you would use Content pages for the information. Then followed by either Question pages, or more Content pages that allow the student to pick their own direction.
I suspect the biggest impact will come from what you’re trying to achieve. If your purpose is to facilitate more self-directed learning, Lesson is still an excellent tool, although its question types are more basic than those in Quiz (especially as of Moodle 3.0). If you want to provide more directed learning experiences for your students, Conditional Quiz Questions allow you to do so. Especially for formative or practice assessments, conditional questions allow you to adjust for common content misconceptions as your student progresses, rather than delaying feedback and appropriate practice opportunities. And given the sheer variety of question types now available in Quiz, there is a lot more diversity you can offer your students for practice questions compared to Lesson.
This is an excellent upgrade to Quiz, an already powerful activity in Moodle – so go explore it! And if you’re looking for more support in how to use this effectively in your own courses, get in touch with us!
