LITS Faculty Guide: 2020-2021 FIT

 In Moodle, the Assignment tool is a powerful way to create assessments, especially open-book, untimed assessments.

The Moodle Assignment activity can have a due date, and can be made available to students at a specific date and time, but it cannot be limited to a length of time measured from when the student opens their exam.

• Consider asking students to conduct a self-assessment, as part of your overall end-of-term assessment plan.
• Use Moodle’s Wiki, Forum, or Assignment tools to facilitate student journaling, or ask those able to access Google Drive to share their writing via either a solo or collaborative Google Doc.
• Ask students to use Moodle’s tools for video or audio recording within a Forum, or to record video responses, demonstrations, or interviews via Zoom.
• Ask for end-of-term presentations, either conducted synchronously, or recorded for later viewing if time zone differences or access issues make live attendance impossible.
• Offer oral exams via videoconference or telephone.
• Encourage students to create visual content using Adobe Creative Suite (free for students at this time) or web-based tools.
• Consider collaborative engagement with media, whether it’s through annotation of a document (Hypothes.is) or collaborative conversations around images (VoiceThread).

While timed assessments are likely to be less equitable under our current learning conditions, you can use the Moodle Quiz tool to create them. You can set the dates the quiz will be available, the amount of time a student has to complete it, and the number of attempts they are able to make. You can also extend the timing for individual users, to ensure that learners with documented accommodations are well-served.

While Moodle calls this type of timed assessment a Quiz, please note that you can use this tool fairly flexibly, to create an assessment made up of a series of questions. Questions can be delivered in a wide variety of formats, ranging from true/false, to drag-and-drop, to essay; a full list is available here. 

Moodle Quizzes are made up of two components - a bank of questions and a specific quiz instance. Once you create questions within a Quiz, you can have them present in different orders for different students, or create a large bank and have a subset of questions appear. For questions with a straightforwardly “correct” answer (such as multiple choice or short answer questions), Moodle will require you to identify which answer is correct, enter a point value for that correct answer, and even include feedback for your students to view if you desire.

If you’re new to Quizzes, we find these two videos from Wisconsin Lutheran College cover the essential highlights. They also use the same theme in Moodle that we do, making it easier to find the tools in question:

• Creating Quizzes From Question Banks (~12 min.)
• Question Bank Management (~8 min.)

Moodle needs your guidance regarding quiz timing, and will default to an untimed state unless you elect specific options. If you are unsure of what you can and cannot do with regard to timed assessments, please start by reviewing the official Moodle documentation on quiz timing. The Educational Technology team is also happy to take your questions on Quizzes at edtech@mtholyoke.edu. 

Be aware that all timed assessments offered through our learning management system are unproctored. The College does not provide support for remote proctoring at this time. If you find that self-proctoring a timed assessment is essential to your course, you could potentially ask students to take a Moodle Quiz while on a Zoom call, but it won’t be possible to monitor their screens or work areas while they are completing said quiz.

Note: You can also use Google Forms to create a quiz. One of the benefits of this tool might be the aggregation of answers in a single Google Sheet, potentially allowing for speedier assessment. For more, see Create and Grade Quizzes With Google Forms. Please note, however, that like all Google products, this will be inaccessible to students studying in China.