importing quiz questions – Viikon e-vinkki

The GIFT format is a format for making quiz questions for Moodle as a .txt file (in UTF8 format) and uploading them to Moodle instead of creating the questions one by one in Moodle. Using a question format like this is faster and it does not require teacher access to Moodle to make the questions (although only a teacher or administrator can import the questions to Moodle). The thing to understand about a format is that it makes question creation easy, provided that the layout of the format is observed rigorously, i.e. the text elements like questions, statements and answers can be freely edited, but the layout should remain the same for all the questions. Even a small change in layout will disable the question.

Example:

The capital of Finland is Helsinki.{TRUE}

will create a true-false question (in which the correct answer is ”True”) and

The capital of Finland is Rovaniemi.{FALSE}

will create a a true-false question (in which the correct answer is ”False”), but

The capital of Finland is Helsinki.{True}

will result in an error message because the layout (font size in the code) is wrong.

When making questions with the GIFT format, it is therefore advisable to copy and paste existing questions and simply replace the text elements to create new questions. In the GIFT format questions are separated by a single blank line. You should use separate .txt files for different question types, since it is recommended to create text files containing only one question type (this creates option for creating a question pool made up of different question categories filled with questions of the same type and value from which a Moodle quiz can randomly draw a specified number. The GIFT layout for true-false questions was given above. The layout for multiple-choice questions is given below:

What is the capital of Finland?{=Helsinki ~Rovaniemi ~Tampere }

The answer preceded by ”=” is the correct answer and the ones preceded by ”~” are incorrect alternatives. The correct answer can always be in the first position, because in the Moodle quiz the answers will be automatically shuffled by default. To create a new multiple-choice question, you would copy the string and replace the parts highlighted in blue, as long as the layout remains the same, you can repeat this process to create as many questions as you need.

General Guidelines for Quiz Questions

There are general rules when creating quiz questions. You should, for example, avoid negative questions (i.e. ask ”What is the capital of Finland?” and do not ask ”What is not the capital of Finland?”) and above all avoid having positive-negative combinations (i.e. ”A is B” and ”A is not B”) in the same quiz. Just imagine what students will think when they get the following questions:

The capital of Finland is Helsinki.
True False

The capital of Finland is not Helsinki.
True False

These two questions exclude each other. If the first statement is true, the second is by definition false and vice versa. Therefore, in general, do not create negative statements/questions unless it cannot be avoided.

In multiple-choice questions you should, moreover, make sure to have reasonable alternative answers. This means that if students do not know the answer to the question, they cannot easily guess the correct alternative. For example,

What is the capital of Finland?{=Helsinki ~Rovaniemi ~Tampere }

is a reasonable question (although three answers is really the minimum; it is better to have four answers), because all alternative answers are Finnish cities, and this question

What is the capital of Finland?{=Helsinki ~Stockholm ~Oslo ~Copenhagen }

is a reasonable question, because all alternatives are capital cities in the North of Europe. However, this question

What is the capital of Finland?{=Helsinki ~Train ~Boat ~Motorcar }

is useless, because the alternatives are of different classes. This question does not test whether the students know what the capital of Finland is, but whether they know the difference between a city and different modes of transport. The correct question to go with these answers would be ”Which of the following is NOT a mode of transport?”, but remember, we do not want negative questions and, apart from that, the answer would still be far too obvious.

In addition, the answers to multiple-choice questions should be of somewhat similar length, so as not to tempt the students to pick the longest answer as the most likely. For example,

What is the capital of Finland?{=Helsinki, which was created the capital of Finland by Russia in 1812 ~Rovaniemi ~Tampere }

Would tempt students to select Helsinki, even if they did not know that Helsinki is the capital and likewise

What is the capital of Finland?{=Helsinki ~Rovaniemi, the home of Santa Claus ~Tampere }

would tempt students who do not know the answer to the question to select Rovaniemi (in this case the incorrect answer).

Furthermore, you should not create trick questions like

Which is the slowest land mammal?{=hare ~snail ~tortoise ~dolphin }

The above question contains in fact two tricks: the fact that the slowest animals listed in the answers are not mammals and that the slowest mammal in the list is not a land mammal. This is again an example of a question in which some of the answer alternatives are of different classes than the one in the question.

Finally, it is good to remember that these are just simple question format examples. There are more question types available in GIFT format and even more in Moodle at large. If you would want to create another type of question than the two described above, e.g. a multiple choice question with more than one correct answer, for instance, contact the eLearning Services at eoppimispalvelut@lapinamk.fi for instructions and template files to use as a starting point.

What with the move from Optima to Moodle that teachers in Rovaniemi are or will be experiencing, it is good to know that there are various ways to import material into Moodle that may make this process smoother.

The Moodle quiz module, for instance, is a powerful tool with many options and many question types. This implies that it may be something of a challenge to novice users to create a quiz and create questions in Moodle. The eLearning services are there to assit, of course, but you can make things a lot easier and faster.

Quizzes occur generally in two main types: the formative quiz, which usually has a variety of question types, and the summative quiz, which is usually made up of a large number of multiple choice questions. For the former the majority of the questions must be made manually, but for the latter there are ways to format the questions, so as to allow bulk upload of the questions to the question bank in Moodle.

Simple text

The very simplest format (Aiken) is made in plain text (e.g. Notepad) and it looks literally like this:

Here goes the text of the first question on one line?
A. Correct answer goes here
B. Wrong answer
C. Wrong answer
D. Wrong answer
ANSWER: A

Here goes the text of the second question on one line?
A. Correct answer goes here
B. Wrong answer
C. Wrong answer
D. Wrong answer
ANSWER: A

In this question format there can be only one correct answer and it can be always in the first place, because Moodle can automatically shuffle the answers. In this format all questions have the same point weight (1). If needed, the relative weight of the questions can be set when the questions are added to a quiz. If teachers deliver questions to the eLearning Services in the Aiken format (with the essential information about the quiz, like instructions, opening and closing dates and times, timer, etc), the quiz can be created in a jiffy, even if there are 100 questions!

With regard to the latter, if you create a summative quiz, it is advisable to create a large pool of questions (perhaps divided over several topic categories), from which the quiz in Moodle can draw at random. In combination with the automatic shuffling of questions and answers, this will ensure that the chance that any two students see a similar quiz is very small indeed. Note that a summative quiz can also contain other auto-graded questions, like true-false or short answer (gap fill) types. There are other question formats (like GIFT) that will allow the creation of those question types.

Hot Potatoes

Perhaps the teacher’s need is a bit more complex than what the above Aiken format can provide. In that case there is another option. If the teacher is familiar with the Hot Potatoes software for creating self-test exercises, he or she can use Hot Potatoes to create the questions and they can include the Multiple Choice, Short Answer, Cloze and Match question types. With the Hot Potatoes XML files the eLearning Services can import these questions into Moodle and then make a quiz with them according to the teacher’s wishes. Note that this is not the same as using a Hot Potatoes XML file in the hotpot module in Moodle, which is quite easy to do, but not as secure or versatile as using the quiz module.