As we have already mentioned in our other articles, Open Edx is a MOOC platform that has lots of features to support a course. One of the very basic features is the ability to assess the knowledge of the trainee who attends a course. This assessment is a very common practice in online courses. One way to achieve it is by using Quizzes at specific points in the course flow. Due to the fact that this is such a common practice, it could not be missing from the Open Edx platform.
Open Edx supports multiple types of problems that can be incorporated into a single section. Some of the most frequently used types are:
- Checkboxes
- Multiple choice
- Dropdown
- Numerical input
- Text input
- Custom Python evaluated field
- Open response Assessment
A knowledge assessment quiz may contain questions from more than one of the above types of questions combined. But let's find out how you can enter the above types of questions into an activity you set up on the Open Edx platform.
Entering an activity on Open Edx
To enter an evaluation activity within Open Edx, you must be within a course sub-section.
From there, you are given the options to insert a component into the subunit:
From the above items, by selecting the Problem item, you can enter all the types of questions mentioned above:
Creating a Checkbox
Using Checkboxes, you can create questions that contain more than one correct answer. By entering this type of question, Open Edx generates a default one:
The default values can of course be changed by choosing to configure the question from Edit. This way you can enter your own question as well as the numbers of possible options, specifying which one(s) of them are correct and which are not.
Entering a Multiple choice Question
The use of Multiple choice questions is appropriate in cases where only one of the possible answers is correct. The default settings when you enter such an item are:
And here of course you can create your own question and its possible answers, choosing to edit this item.
Using Drop Down
The Drop Down has the same utility as the Multiple choice element, since only one answer can be correct, simply with a different representation.
The settings, as well as the code hidden behind this item, are shown in Edit:
Entering Text and Numerical Input
These elements work the same way, that's why we're discussing them together. In essence, they provide a framework in which the user can write the answer to the question posed to him. Then, with the Matching process, the system checks if the user's response was the desired one or not. The only difference between these 2 fields is that when using the text input it is expected from the user to enter text…
… while in the numerical input the user is expected to type numbers.
Special attention must be paid to these elements because of the Matching that takes place, between the user's input and the standard solution designed by the teacher. If, for example, the teacher writes that the correct answer to the question is "Giorgos Psathas." with a dot, and the user gives the alphanumeric “Giorgos Psathas” without a dot, the answer will be marked as incorrect.
Of course, the teacher can initially provide different possible solutions as correct in order to cover more possible answers by the users.
Custom Python Evaluated Field
Now we will discuss some more advanced elements that you can enter in the User Rating Quiz. The first thing we will see is the so-called Custom Python Evaluated Field. This item can receive the user input, run some Python code on it, and then return if the user input was correct or not.
In the default example generated by this item, the user is prompted to provide 2 values which add up to 10, but also 2 values whose sum is 20 and using Python the correctness of the answers is checked.
Open Response Assessment
The last element that we will review concerning the knowledge assessment of the trainees in a course, is the tool Open Response Assessment or simply ORA.
This item allows users to give an open-ended answer to a query or even upload a file with the answer to the query. This type of activity is often used in programming lessons where learners are asked to upload a file with the code they wrote in response to a question that was posed to them.
This answer can then either enter the Peer Review Process, where other learners attending the same course will give their evaluation to a user's answer, or be rated by the teacher.
Conclusions
The Open Edx platform has powerful tools for assessing a user's knowledge that enable the teacher to evaluate the learning outcomes of the course they created.
All of the above elements, with the exception of the Open Response Assessment activity, can be combined into a Quiz that may contain multiple questions of many different types.
All the instructors who choose to upload their course to the Letstudy platform and want to include user knowledge assessment activities, after designing all the Quizzes, can rely to the Letstudy team to undertake the setup and configuration of all the assessment activities on the Letstudy platform.
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