Message-ID: <5137299.1182532584487.JavaMail.joeescobar@joe-escobars-computer.local>
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:36:06 -0800 (PST)
From: moodleadmin
Reply-To: Online@lanecc.edu
Subject: Email to faculty: Issues with online quizzes
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OK, folks: another quick message for you to look over.  This one is about b=
est practices for taking quizzes--we had a problem with a student losing wo=
rk yesterday when her session timed out after she worked on her essay quest=
ions for over two hours.  I have two suggestions to instructors to counter =
that: 1) encourage their students to use the "Save without submitting" butt=
on; and 2) break their quiz up into multiple pages.  I want to make sure I'=
m not going against any practices that you guys recommend in your faculty w=
orkshops, so I'd appreciate it if you could quickly glance over what I've i=
ncluded below.


The relevant text:

----
First: quizzes.  We had an incident yesterday where a student put in over t=
wo hours on an essay question and then (gulp) lost her work because Moodle =
logged her out because it registered her session as inactive (typing into t=
he quiz window doesn't actually require any communication with the server u=
ntil the results are saved, so there's no way for the server to know whethe=
r a student taking a quiz is still 'active').  To guard against this proble=
m, and any others that may arise (network failures, browser hangs, machine =
crashes, power outages, etc), we strongly suggest that you tell your studen=
ts to use the Save without submitting button periodically as they work on t=
heir quizzes.  This saves whatever the student has entered to the database =
so that in the event of a catastrophe, the student's work is recoverable.  =
When the student is completely done, she then clicks the Save all and finis=
h button to submit the completed test.=20

Another suggestion: you can limit the number of questions that a student se=
es on a single page.  This may not be necessary for your standard issue mul=
tiple-choice test, but if you have several essay questions that may involve=
 long answers, it would be a very good idea to break those up over several =
pages.  The reason is that the more content has to be submitted, the longer=
 the server will take to process it, and it's possible (unlikely, but possi=
ble) for the server to time out before everything is saved (in my tests, I =
started having problems at around twelve single-spaced pages, but if the lo=
ad on the server is very high, a smaller amount could still cause problems)=
.  You can restrict the number of questions on a page by updaing the quiz (=
select the Quiz, then click Update this Quiz): look for the "Questions per =
page" item.  By default, this is set to unlimited.  You can set it to anyth=
ing from 1 to 50.  Students can still navigate back and forth between pages=
, so you're not restricting their ability to go back and revisit questions;=
 you're just laying things out a little differently.
----

Thanks.

David



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David Walton
Moodle System Administrator
Lane Community College
For enrollment, course creation, logging in, or general server issues, emai=
l moodleadmin@lanecc.edu
For faculty assistance using Moodle, email online@lanecc.edu
Voice: 463-3367
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