Moodle : Continuous Online Assessment

This presentation was given by Mignon Smit 'a stay at home mum' who set up a website to help school children to test themselves. She joined MM7 and now she runs several websites.

First of all most people do a pre-assessment to find out where students are before they start, then they do a continuous assessment to help students understanding and reduce the risk of drop out and finally they do a summative assessment to see how the students have improved.

She is only concerned with continuous assessment as the teachers use the other two. Where she lives parents are given a copy of the syllabus and she wanted to know how her children were progressing. She worked creating the course at the same pace as her children at school and she also doesn't charge to avoid copyright problems.

She then went on to talk about the different types of question and then into her way of creating the course. First of all you need the topic, then the questions, you create the course and finally create the quiz for each topic. She told us about gamification of the quizzes by adding badges to the quiz.

Some tips for writing questions is not to repeat things in the answers, better to put it  in the question. Avoid double negatives always use positives whenever possible and finally to use except' rather than 'not' questions. (all of these are ... except..) She also talked about some does and don'ts of distractors

In addition to the above points she talked about making the options about the same length. It is quite common for the correct answer to be longer than the others and I have personally taken courses where it was possible to predict most of the answers just by selecting the longest!

She also gave us a list of things to avoid.

When the students take her tests they have the option to give feedback to her if they think there is a problem with a question. She showed us a list of question types which are available in Moodle.

As the children were getting bored with multiple choice questions she introduced Hot Potatoes activities including crosswords and other tools which reengaged them again

She finished up by showing some feedback from her young learners and their parents and the results were generally positive. Unfortunately the schools where her children go to school do not allow the use of tech so she will be homeschooling her children using tech.

This was a brilliant session with lots of useful ideas and practical advice. Thank you Mignon.