With the aim of creating adaptive learning, as an instructional designer, developer and facilitator, you need to create test items and plenty of them. With Moodle as your LMS, you need to find an efficient way to do so, some rapid development best practice, so you can maintain quality and stay alive.
In such a scenario, I have been working on General Education Development courses with mathematics, reading and writing content at a grade 10 level creating exercises, quizzes, practice tests, pre-tests, and post-tests using the Moodle Question Bank. I have been taking scanned and OCR (optical character recognition) processed texts, with copyright permissions, and importing them into the Question Bank. With each quiz or test, there is a fair bit of work to be done, but the import still beats re-entering or re-creating these hundreds of items in terms of time and energy.
The first step is to open the PDF version of the text and begin copying the text to a Notepad file. To do so in Acrobat Reader, you use the pointer tool and drag across the text. If the questions are in columns, you may have to drag up from the bottom or only drag down until you start selecting from the other column. The goal is to grab as many items as you can to keep this efficient.
You then switch to Notepad and CTRL+V (paste) in the contents. Immediately you will notice unnecessary line breaks and absent images. With math tests, you will also spot gobbledygook fractions and scrambled equations. Don't worry. We will fix those soon enough. Now you begin to strip the text. Using the Replace command and dialog, you will remove all the distractor numbering and its proceeding space: for example (1) and (2). You will remove the item numbering and its following spaces by double-clicking on the number and then pressing the DEL button. Next, you will march through the item and distractor stems to remove those line breaks, with your thumb on the space bar and your index on the DEL button while your other hand drives to the end of each new line with the mouse. Clickety click. Baba trick. While clicking through, you will make sure there is one blank line between each item but no blank lines between the stem or distractors. Lastly, for math exams you have to fix the fractions, exponents and equations. For fractions and equations, you start with Tex, a math notation system. This notation system makes the best route as the LMS will store the expressions as text and render them with MathJax as opposed to a multitude of images required to load and stay in memory. For a fraction, you enter the start tag, the fraction command, the numerator and denominator, and the end tag. To enter one quarter, you would type \(\frac{1}{4}\) into the item. You then copy and paste this Tex format to reuse throughout. To fix exponents, you use the <sup></sup> html tags with the exponent value in the middle. Lastly, you need to enter the answers. Answers are marked with an asterix at the front of the stem with no spaces. You can also attach "-com-" and then a solution for each item to provide rich feedback. Now everything is pretty.
Having done this work, you sit back and take a sip of your coffee. Hopefully, you are still a believer, realizing that for every item you have had to tweak on a fifty item test, you have been saved typing over two thousand words. Thus relieved, you push on to creating the GIFT file.
The GIFT file is a universal import structure which involves extremely accessible text files and a much needed easy format. To transform the test text file into a GIFT format text file, you use CTRL + A and CTRL+C to copy the contents and then CTRL+V paste into the large text area box on the Moodle Test Creator web page, publicly available (http://text2gift.atwebpages.com/Text2GiftConverter.html). Firstly, be sure to enter in a code to identify where these questions came from in the Exam Identifier text box as this code will be used to generate the names of each of the items on Moodle. I use the course code, a unit code, and a publisher code: for example, I use "GED U6 CAMB" for unit six of the GED Course taken from the Cambridge GED text. Although this code does not work as the best naming convention for an item bank, it will work well for importing as it will become onerous to do much tracking once you have entered in over five hundred items. Secondly, enter in a file name in the appropriate text box so you can distinguish the various GIFT text files you create. As the character length is limited, use a short code. For example, I use "GED U6 CAMB GFT". Lastly, click on the Send button. The file will be downloaded to your Downloads directory. Once downloaded, CTRL+X cut the file and paste it into your exam import directory that you will have created. The conversion is fairly quick.
The next step in the process is to import into Moodle. Click on the Question Bank folder under the Course Administration block to open the Question Bank administration pages. On the new page, in the expanded submenu, you will see a link for Categories. One time only, you should create a category for each of the types of activities in the unit. With each category, you will need a parent category with a unit name. This pattern works well to keep items grouped according to unit and delineates their use. It will be important to reserve some items for exercises and some for post-tests. For example, I use Mathematics as a parent category for a unit and have "Exercises", "Quizzes", "Pre-Tests", "Practice Tests" and "Post-Tests" as children categories just for the Mathematics Unit. Once you have the categories, you then click on the Import link. On this page, you select the GIFT format option, pick the category from the drop-down menu, uncheck the "Get category from file" option, and drag the file into the "Choose file" box. When ready, click the Import button. A results page will appear hopefully with a preview of the questions indicating success. Click on the Continue button, and you will be taken to the Questions page with your newly imported items awaiting editing.
At this point, you have reached the final climb to the peak of the mountain. You must now add any passages or pictures to your questions. While doing so, you will also add style for clarity and consistency. To begin, you capture the images in the PDF using the snapshot tool. You select with the snapshot tool and then CTRL+V into Paint. In Paint, you hit the crop button. Then, you click on Save As to give the image a name and number and save it to an exam images directory. For future use and reuse, I use the course code, unit code, and then IMG with a number started at 10000 for sorting purposes. For example, I enter GEDP1521 U6 10004 for my fourth image. I keep the Paint window open as I continue to copy, paste, crop and save as new images from the PDF text. With pictures copied, you will go back to your Moodle Questions page, and right-click on the gears for any of the questions that refer to a shared passage or picture combination. When the menu appears, you will click on "Open in a new tab" as there will be much copying and pasting to do.
At this point, some previous rapid development support work will need to have been done. For example, I have created several separate text files with the html style code for the different types of questions: question only, question with passage, question with picture, question with passage and picture, and question with passage and document. These styles provide borders and consistency. They also create a responsive layout, important to learners with different screens and devices. For each item, you will CTRL+A and CTRL+C the appropriate style from the style text file. The CTRL+A which selects all is important as there are some necessary spaces at the end of the text that need to be captured. You will then click on the <> html view button for the question, place the cursor at the front of the question, and then CTRL+V the style in. You will jump to the end of the item and add a </p> to finish the item. Now that you have injected the style, you will need to add the passage or document text. Switch back to the pdf and copy the text of the passage of the text or document. Paste the text into the Moodle question item between the opening <p> and closing </p>. You may need to insert some </p><p> tags to create new paragraphs in the passages or documents. For pictures, you will then switch out of html view by clicking on the <> toggle button. Next, you click on the image, and then click on the toolbar image button. In the dialog that appears, you will choose the image file, you previously captured, enter in an image description and save image. Once the new image appears, you will enter the html view again. You select the text from the end of the style you inserted to the top of the item html. For my style text files, the selection would be from "<p><strong>QUESTION:</strong> " with the ending space included up to the top of the html. You will then CTRl+C and then CTRL+V this html into the html views of the remaining questions in the series in the tabs you previously opened. For each passage, image and document, you may need to change the type declared in the brief direction statement preceding, such as "article", "graph", "essay", "poem", "script", "table" or "diagram". This copy and paste will save you from re-entering passages and image descriptions.
Now here is the first snag. If your organization has set up a file system repository into which you have stored the images, your image links will work. If not, you will have to switch out of the html view for each item after pasting to re-upload a new instance of the image file. To make this the least onerous that I can, for the first item, I click on the image button in the toolbar, click on the Choose file button, and select the image. I then CTRL+C and CTRL+V for each additional item that will refer to this picture. I then select the first instance of the image and upload it. As I move to each of the next items, I select the image, click on the image toolbar upload the next instance of the image. I then click on the Save Image button without having to enter in the new description. At some point, as you are working on these items, you will be deceived by the internet. As you go to change the subsequent items, you will have pasted in the html from the first item. You will notice the correct image appears as it should. Beware. You are seeing the image because as the editor you have the rights to see the image in the link in any of the courses you teach or develop in. However, once you save this item, the link will change and the picture will not display. You need to change the picture and upload a new instance. In short, beg for a file system repository.
At this point, you may stop and ponder as to why you are copying and pasting these shared passages, documents and images into each item. Moodle's question bank does not allow you to link multiple items to a shared reference. Hopefully, other instructors, educational assistants or would-be developers will use one or several items from this set and will need to do so easily without having to chase down references. Even more so, with adaptive training, you will need Moodle to select questions at random from the question bank so you can create nearly unlimited forms of your tests, while not losing those critical references. Trust me on this one. I have lived the pain of creating and then re-doing. There is no fun in that. The quality of these items includes re-purposability.
This step of inserting styles and references is where we keep the quality in our rapid development process and should not be skipped.
At this point, you may feel daunted. However, instead you should find comfort that you have created items that will work and will last. When you set up a project system and work with others, you will notice the tremendous efficiency that results: in particular, when developers take on different roles. Your students will notice when they have a range of quality items providing rich and immediate feedback with which to adjust their learning paths.
In such a scenario, I have been working on General Education Development courses with mathematics, reading and writing content at a grade 10 level creating exercises, quizzes, practice tests, pre-tests, and post-tests using the Moodle Question Bank. I have been taking scanned and OCR (optical character recognition) processed texts, with copyright permissions, and importing them into the Question Bank. With each quiz or test, there is a fair bit of work to be done, but the import still beats re-entering or re-creating these hundreds of items in terms of time and energy.
The first step is to open the PDF version of the text and begin copying the text to a Notepad file. To do so in Acrobat Reader, you use the pointer tool and drag across the text. If the questions are in columns, you may have to drag up from the bottom or only drag down until you start selecting from the other column. The goal is to grab as many items as you can to keep this efficient.
You then switch to Notepad and CTRL+V (paste) in the contents. Immediately you will notice unnecessary line breaks and absent images. With math tests, you will also spot gobbledygook fractions and scrambled equations. Don't worry. We will fix those soon enough. Now you begin to strip the text. Using the Replace command and dialog, you will remove all the distractor numbering and its proceeding space: for example (1) and (2). You will remove the item numbering and its following spaces by double-clicking on the number and then pressing the DEL button. Next, you will march through the item and distractor stems to remove those line breaks, with your thumb on the space bar and your index on the DEL button while your other hand drives to the end of each new line with the mouse. Clickety click. Baba trick. While clicking through, you will make sure there is one blank line between each item but no blank lines between the stem or distractors. Lastly, for math exams you have to fix the fractions, exponents and equations. For fractions and equations, you start with Tex, a math notation system. This notation system makes the best route as the LMS will store the expressions as text and render them with MathJax as opposed to a multitude of images required to load and stay in memory. For a fraction, you enter the start tag, the fraction command, the numerator and denominator, and the end tag. To enter one quarter, you would type \(\frac{1}{4}\) into the item. You then copy and paste this Tex format to reuse throughout. To fix exponents, you use the <sup></sup> html tags with the exponent value in the middle. Lastly, you need to enter the answers. Answers are marked with an asterix at the front of the stem with no spaces. You can also attach "-com-" and then a solution for each item to provide rich feedback. Now everything is pretty.
Having done this work, you sit back and take a sip of your coffee. Hopefully, you are still a believer, realizing that for every item you have had to tweak on a fifty item test, you have been saved typing over two thousand words. Thus relieved, you push on to creating the GIFT file.
The GIFT file is a universal import structure which involves extremely accessible text files and a much needed easy format. To transform the test text file into a GIFT format text file, you use CTRL + A and CTRL+C to copy the contents and then CTRL+V paste into the large text area box on the Moodle Test Creator web page, publicly available (http://text2gift.atwebpages.com/Text2GiftConverter.html). Firstly, be sure to enter in a code to identify where these questions came from in the Exam Identifier text box as this code will be used to generate the names of each of the items on Moodle. I use the course code, a unit code, and a publisher code: for example, I use "GED U6 CAMB" for unit six of the GED Course taken from the Cambridge GED text. Although this code does not work as the best naming convention for an item bank, it will work well for importing as it will become onerous to do much tracking once you have entered in over five hundred items. Secondly, enter in a file name in the appropriate text box so you can distinguish the various GIFT text files you create. As the character length is limited, use a short code. For example, I use "GED U6 CAMB GFT". Lastly, click on the Send button. The file will be downloaded to your Downloads directory. Once downloaded, CTRL+X cut the file and paste it into your exam import directory that you will have created. The conversion is fairly quick.
The next step in the process is to import into Moodle. Click on the Question Bank folder under the Course Administration block to open the Question Bank administration pages. On the new page, in the expanded submenu, you will see a link for Categories. One time only, you should create a category for each of the types of activities in the unit. With each category, you will need a parent category with a unit name. This pattern works well to keep items grouped according to unit and delineates their use. It will be important to reserve some items for exercises and some for post-tests. For example, I use Mathematics as a parent category for a unit and have "Exercises", "Quizzes", "Pre-Tests", "Practice Tests" and "Post-Tests" as children categories just for the Mathematics Unit. Once you have the categories, you then click on the Import link. On this page, you select the GIFT format option, pick the category from the drop-down menu, uncheck the "Get category from file" option, and drag the file into the "Choose file" box. When ready, click the Import button. A results page will appear hopefully with a preview of the questions indicating success. Click on the Continue button, and you will be taken to the Questions page with your newly imported items awaiting editing.
At this point, you have reached the final climb to the peak of the mountain. You must now add any passages or pictures to your questions. While doing so, you will also add style for clarity and consistency. To begin, you capture the images in the PDF using the snapshot tool. You select with the snapshot tool and then CTRL+V into Paint. In Paint, you hit the crop button. Then, you click on Save As to give the image a name and number and save it to an exam images directory. For future use and reuse, I use the course code, unit code, and then IMG with a number started at 10000 for sorting purposes. For example, I enter GEDP1521 U6 10004 for my fourth image. I keep the Paint window open as I continue to copy, paste, crop and save as new images from the PDF text. With pictures copied, you will go back to your Moodle Questions page, and right-click on the gears for any of the questions that refer to a shared passage or picture combination. When the menu appears, you will click on "Open in a new tab" as there will be much copying and pasting to do.
At this point, some previous rapid development support work will need to have been done. For example, I have created several separate text files with the html style code for the different types of questions: question only, question with passage, question with picture, question with passage and picture, and question with passage and document. These styles provide borders and consistency. They also create a responsive layout, important to learners with different screens and devices. For each item, you will CTRL+A and CTRL+C the appropriate style from the style text file. The CTRL+A which selects all is important as there are some necessary spaces at the end of the text that need to be captured. You will then click on the <> html view button for the question, place the cursor at the front of the question, and then CTRL+V the style in. You will jump to the end of the item and add a </p> to finish the item. Now that you have injected the style, you will need to add the passage or document text. Switch back to the pdf and copy the text of the passage of the text or document. Paste the text into the Moodle question item between the opening <p> and closing </p>. You may need to insert some </p><p> tags to create new paragraphs in the passages or documents. For pictures, you will then switch out of html view by clicking on the <> toggle button. Next, you click on the image, and then click on the toolbar image button. In the dialog that appears, you will choose the image file, you previously captured, enter in an image description and save image. Once the new image appears, you will enter the html view again. You select the text from the end of the style you inserted to the top of the item html. For my style text files, the selection would be from "<p><strong>QUESTION:</strong> " with the ending space included up to the top of the html. You will then CTRl+C and then CTRL+V this html into the html views of the remaining questions in the series in the tabs you previously opened. For each passage, image and document, you may need to change the type declared in the brief direction statement preceding, such as "article", "graph", "essay", "poem", "script", "table" or "diagram". This copy and paste will save you from re-entering passages and image descriptions.
Now here is the first snag. If your organization has set up a file system repository into which you have stored the images, your image links will work. If not, you will have to switch out of the html view for each item after pasting to re-upload a new instance of the image file. To make this the least onerous that I can, for the first item, I click on the image button in the toolbar, click on the Choose file button, and select the image. I then CTRL+C and CTRL+V for each additional item that will refer to this picture. I then select the first instance of the image and upload it. As I move to each of the next items, I select the image, click on the image toolbar upload the next instance of the image. I then click on the Save Image button without having to enter in the new description. At some point, as you are working on these items, you will be deceived by the internet. As you go to change the subsequent items, you will have pasted in the html from the first item. You will notice the correct image appears as it should. Beware. You are seeing the image because as the editor you have the rights to see the image in the link in any of the courses you teach or develop in. However, once you save this item, the link will change and the picture will not display. You need to change the picture and upload a new instance. In short, beg for a file system repository.
At this point, you may stop and ponder as to why you are copying and pasting these shared passages, documents and images into each item. Moodle's question bank does not allow you to link multiple items to a shared reference. Hopefully, other instructors, educational assistants or would-be developers will use one or several items from this set and will need to do so easily without having to chase down references. Even more so, with adaptive training, you will need Moodle to select questions at random from the question bank so you can create nearly unlimited forms of your tests, while not losing those critical references. Trust me on this one. I have lived the pain of creating and then re-doing. There is no fun in that. The quality of these items includes re-purposability.
This step of inserting styles and references is where we keep the quality in our rapid development process and should not be skipped.
At this point, you may feel daunted. However, instead you should find comfort that you have created items that will work and will last. When you set up a project system and work with others, you will notice the tremendous efficiency that results: in particular, when developers take on different roles. Your students will notice when they have a range of quality items providing rich and immediate feedback with which to adjust their learning paths.
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