As discussed in previous posts, audience response technologies such as TurningPoint and Socrative are becoming increasingly popular in learning and teaching. Over the summer, we’ll be releasing a new plugin into Moodle 2016 that enables live and interactive student polling from within the Moodle environment.
Active Quiz, as it is known, works very much like the existing Moodle quiz activity; questions can be created in advance, written in a variety of formats (MCQ, calculated, true/false, etc.) and displayed to students at a time specified by the teacher.
The added benefit of Active Quiz is that preexisting Moodle quiz questions can be used, meaning that teachers can quickly poll students using questions that have been written for a separate assessment within Moodle – this is ideal for revision sessions.
The teacher can specify how long students have to answer particular questions, the weighting of the marks associated with a question and the number of attempts that can be made.
During a session, upon instruction from their teacher, students access their Moodle module in the usual way via their laptop, tablet device or smart phone. Once in the Moodle module, they click on the link to the Active Quiz, just as they would do with any other Moodle resource or activity.
Once the teacher begins polling, questions appear on the students’ devices. A countdown timer will display how long students have to answer the question. Active Quiz is able to display images, videos and LaTex on the students’ devices and, depending on the question type, students are able to type textual or numeric responses using their device. Teachers can also specify whether student response data is anonymised.
Teachers have the option to display real-time polling results on their screen and can monitor student responses as they come in. Additionally, teachers can choose to re-poll questions, display correct/incorrect answers or move on to subsequent questions in the session.
Response data, including individual question responses and overall grades, is stored within the Moodle grade book alongside Moodle quiz marks, GradeMark data and other grade-bearing activities.
If you would like a demonstration of this new feature in preparation for the 2016/17 academic year, please contact your Faculty Learning Technologist.