Editing Moodle Questions

Moodle is the Learning Management System used on the CNT CLASS server. This page is designed to assist you in the editing of Moodle compatible questions. Questions for editing will be provided to you by the instructor in GIFT format which is a text file format. The complete GIFT format documentation can be found on The Moodle GIFT site but this should give you enough information to get started with the most popular types of questions. If you haven't read it yet you should also read the Writing Moodle Questions page on this site for more information about different types of questions and formatting.

General Editing Directions

Your job is to look at and correct the question pool you have been given. You can work on the questions in any text editor though a plain text editor is best. An example of a plain text editor on Microsoft Windows is the notepad.exe program. For each question in the pool you should:

• Verify the question and the answers are easy to understand and grammatically correct
• Document why the each answer is correct or incorrect and where the correct answer can be verified

There are some things to check based on the question type as well:

• True/False "questions" should always be statements (end with a period) and NOT questions.
• Multiple-Choice-Multiple-Answer (MCMA) questions, the ones with more than one correct answer and check-boxes instead of buttons, should have tildes (~) and percentages for each answer. The percentages for the correct answers should be equal and add up to 100% and each incorrect answer should be the same percent (but negative).
• Matching questions should generally have the shorter part of the question on the right (which appears in the dropdown box)

If you find any problems make a correction!

You also need to look at the question pool as a whole. Does it adequately cover all of the important information from the chapter? If not you should add questions to the pool to cover the missing points from the chapter. These questions should generally be matching or multiple choice and not true/false. Overall a pool should not normally have more than 10% of it's questions as true/false questions. Try to stay close to 10% or less true/false. Add more questions of another type and/or remove t/f questions to get 10% or less as t/f. Save newly created questions to a different file than the edited questions.

Attach both of the text files (the edited questions and the new questions) to an email message and send them back to the instructor. It is important these files be a standard text file and not another type of document format. Edit your questions in a text editor and not in Microsoft Word or another word processor! These programs often autocorrect some of the formatting and insert special characters which cause problems when trying to import the file. If these problems are encountered I will send the file back to you to fix.

Example Question Editing

Multiple Choice Question

This will walk you though the parts of a regular multiple choice, single answer (MCSA) question and the correction process. For more information on how other types of questions (such as matching, true/false and multiple choice multiple answer) should look when corrected see the Writing Moodle Questions page.

Example Original Question

Here is what the formatting will look like in the question pool you receive from the instructor.

// question: 3381  name: What is the shell originaly based on C shell? 
::What is the shell originaly based on C shell?::What is the shell originaly based on C shell?{
	~tcsh# 
	~bsh# 
	~bash# 
	=zsh#
	~csh# 
}

As you can see there are a lot of problems with this question! There is a spelling mistake, the question is not as clear as it could be, the "correct" answer is really incorrect, there is no feedback information about any of the answers and which answer is the right one is not as clear as it should be.

Parts of the Question

The line

// question: 3381  name: What is the shell originaly based on C shell?

is just a comment, it is not really part of the question and any changes you make to this line will not actually fix anything.

The line

::What is the shell originaly based on C shell?::What is the shell originaly based on C shell?{

looks repetitive but it's not. The first part of the line, between the double colons, is the name of the question. The second part of the line is the question itself. For most questions these should be identical but if the question is long or has special formatting the name of the question will be a short and simple description of what the question is asking about instead of a complete duplication of the question.

The answer section of a question is enclosed in curly braces

{
	~tcsh# 
	~bsh# 
	~bash# 
	=zsh#
	~csh# 
}

The opening curly brace is usually included at the end of the line above where the question is which is fine. Each line in the answer section contains one answer and is indented with one tab. Incorrect answers begin with a tilde (~) and the correct answer begins with an equals sign (=). After the answer a pound or hash sign (#) indicates the rest of the line is feedback on the question. This should be a brief explanation of why the answer is correct or incorrect as well as where to verify the correct answer.

It is not uncommon for questions about computer topics to include some of the special question formatting characters like curly braces, tildes, hashes, equals signs and slashes (forward or backward). If these special characters are part of the question, answer or feedback each one needs to be escaped. To escape a special character you put a single backslash in front of it such as \# which will print just as a # when the question, answer or feedback is displayed.

Example Edited Question

Here is one example of how this question could be corrected. Note that the comment line has been left uncorrected as it is not actually used or displayed anywhere. You can leave the comment in or take it out, it's up to you. You may also want to add your own comment to the question for your own use to know you have checked and corrected the question, that's also up to you.

// question: 3381  name: What is the shell originaly based on C shell? 
// Question has been edited by Ben Franske
::Which shell was originally based on C shell?::Which shell was originally based on C shell?{
	=tcsh#tcsh is based on the C shell (csh). Textbook page 5
	~bsh#bsh is the Bourne shell, it is not based on the C shell. Textbook page 5
	~bash#The GNU Bourne Again Shell (bash) is based on the Bourne shell (bsh), it is not based on the C shell. Textbook page 4
	~zsh#The Z shell takes features from a variety of shells but is not based on one shell in particular. Textbook page 5
}