The following is an excerpt from my new book Moodle in Minutes: A Practical Introduction for New Online Instructors. You can purchase it on Amazon here.
Adding a Quiz
Quizzes are among the most important activities in Moodle and in an online course, period. Just like in a regular classroom, a quiz serves as an assessment for teachers to gauge how well their students are moving along in the learning process. I include a quiz with every week or topic.
To add a quiz, first click Add an activity or resource as you did for all previous activities. Scroll down until you find the Quiz option, select the circle to its left and finally click Add.
The “Editing Quiz” page will open, allowing you to first add a name. If you’d like, you can add a description to ease some of the worries of anxious students, and select the box next to “Display description on course page,” but in my opinion, the course looks cleaner and trimmer without it. Alternatively, you could provide a description that simply shows up when the quiz is taken, and not click the “Display description” option.
Editing a Quiz
When you’ve selected the options you think are appropriate for your quiz, click Save and display to begin editing and adding questions. The page that loads will include a button to edit the quiz. Click it to begin.
The “Editing quiz” page will load, and if questions were added previously, you would see them listed. However, as this is our first quiz, you’ll need to click Add and then + a new question to create a quiz question.A window will open in the middle of the page, much like when you add an activity or resource. Called “Choose a question type to add,” this window lists all of the types of assessment items you have at your disposal. As you can see, some are geared toward math, while others are for any subject matter.
For practical purposes, we’ll go over three of the assessment items that I think are the most useful for most subjects: Multiple choice, Select missing words and True/False.
Multiple Choice
For all quiz items, you will see the category option, question name and question text (the rich text editor). “Category” allows you to file the question in either the quiz itself, another quiz or section, or in the course’s question bank in general. In this exercise, we’ll file our question in the quiz itself. I like to include a name like “Q1 [topic name]” to indicate that it’s the first question I created for the particular topic.
In the rich text editor, add your multiple choice question. Below the editor is another text box (“General feedback”) for providing automatic feedback that the student will see once they complete the question. This is a great place to elaborate on the big idea related to the question and answer.
Below “General feedback” you can choose whether one answer or multiple answers are allowed in response to the question. If you choose to allow multiple answers, you will then need to adjust the percentages below the choices in the “Grade” section. For example, if two choices are correct, then set each correct choice to 50%. You should provide a negative percentage (e.g. -50%) to the incorrect choices to ensure that a student who simply ticks all the boxes does not receive 100% credit. On the other hand, if only one answer is correct, the “Grade” should be set to 100%, with all incorrect answers being left as the default “None”. Once you provide 4 choices and allocate a grade total of 100% to one choice or a combination of choices (in the case that multiple answers are allowed), click Save changes.You will then be returned to the “Editing quiz” page. Notice that our example question now appears.
There are even more assessment items and activities covered in my book Moodle in Minutes: A Practical Introduction for New Online Instructors.