Practical Examples
Quizzes in Moodle with Trine Fink
Practical Examples
Quizzes in Moodle with Trine Fink
Facts
- Lecturer: Trine Fink
- Faculty: SUND
- Department: Department of Health Science and Technology
- Education: Combined Medicine and MedIS
- Course: Nutrition and digestion
- Semester: 2nd semester
- Number of students: 250
- Teaching format: Case based teaching
With such a large class, it is impossible for the educator to provide individual feedback to the students. Therefore, Trine Fink uses quizzes to help the students evaluate how well they have achieved the weekly learning objectives. This was introduced partly because there had previously been uncertainty among students about whether they had learned enough.
Out of the four principles for digitally supported learning, these are relevant:
Inclusion:
Inclusion is accommodated because students who struggle with certain topics can take the quizzes and receive immediate feedback. This helps ensure they do not automatically fall behind. At the same time, it is a teaching activity that everyone can participate in according to their individual conditions.
(You can read about their content below, and otherwise, you can see more here: https://www.iaspbl.aau.dk/projects/principles-for-digitally-supported-pbl)
- Variation: Students are motivated and learn in different ways, which is the reason why variation can benefit all students in the form of multiple approaches to learning, lecturing, and education. In this context, the digital can help expand the scope of possibilities for education and support variation as a principle at multiple practical levels.
- Collaboration and Openness: Digital technologies enable new types of collaboration that extend beyond the individual course or project work, making it easier to open up to other stakeholders, a larger number of participants, create cross-collaboration, or envision entirely new forms of cooperation.
- Co-determination and Empowerment: Digital technologies can support empowerment and help increase student co-determination beyond project work. They can enable larger and more active learning communities that involve both students and educators in the individual programs, but also across them.
- Inclusion: Digital technologies can contribute to supporting the work of creating inclusion through a conscious focus on accessibility, diversity, and flexibility. The principle aims to make educational and teaching activities available to all students and also ensure that the individual student has a sense of being able to participate with their individual premises.
The course involved a case-based module. Each case lasted one week. Work on the case took place at the beginning and end of the week. In the meantime, there were lectures and exercises. The exercises consisted of assignments and reflection questions, which were solved individually or in groups. Students had access to help with these assignments/questions at specific times, but they decided themselves when to work otherwise.
There was always a quiz at the end of the week. In addition, there could be supplementary quizzes with embedded videos as part of the exercises, but this was not always the case.
One of the exercise sessions, for example, concerned the upper digestive system. As part of this, students had to learn about the blood supply to the digestive system. This can be difficult to visualise without seeing it explained in 3D. Therefore, I found an existing video in English on the topic. Their task was to watch the video and identify the Danish terms. These terms were then entered in a Moodle quiz. The quiz was set up to accept all existing terms, including various abbreviations.
Students generally appreciate being able to check their own learning continuously through quizzes. This applies regardless of whether videos are linked to the quiz. Students have a desire for feedback, and we also know it benefits their learning. The advantage of quizzes is that they enable feedback independently of the lecturer, who cannot always reach all students.
Regarding videos, quality, copyright and language can be a challenge if you use material created by others. If you produce your own, the challenge is the resources required for production. For complex topics, however, a 3D visualisation through video is clearly an advantage. Another benefit is that students can watch the material multiple times as needed, which they greatly appreciate.
It is resource‑intensive to learn how to use the quiz module and to construct each quiz. Therefore, you should be sure you intend to use it continuously and that the quizzes you create can be reused at least four times. You might start with simple quizzes with few questions and expand continuously. If you ensure this, I can certainly recommend it.
If you want to make use of exercises where students work with material on their own and then check their knowledge through a quiz, it is still important to schedule sessions where they can speak to a physical person about questions of doubt. These sessions can easily be handled by student instructors under the supervision of the course coordinator.