6.5.3 Quiz tool

The quiz tool enables you to build quizzes comprising questions of various different types, such as multiple choice, matching, short-answer and numerical. It also has an essay question type, however this is less useful in an open online course with no tutor because it cannot easily be marked unless there is human intervention for marking unique textual answers. A quiz can be used for both formative and summative type assessment. It can be set up to record that a person has attempted the questions or that the learner has reached an appropriate grade score to pass the quiz.

Figure 2 Screenshot of a practice quiz from Succeed with maths 1 (OpenLearn).

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This image depicts the progress through a quiz.  On the left there is a ‘back to course’ button, just below it is a Heading labelled ‘Questions’ and below this are numbers 1 to 5 in a row. Below each number is either a tick or a circle.  Numbers 1 and 2 have ticks, numbers 3, 4 and 5 have circles indicating that those questions have not yet been completed.  On the right is Question 3, which is a mathematics question. Below Question 3 the text says ‘tries remaining: 3’. The question is ‘write 7/100 as a decimal number’. Below the question is a text box for the answer and a button which is labelled ‘check your answers’.

Figure 2 Screenshot of a practice quiz from Succeed with maths 1 (OpenLearn).

A formative quiz can give learners opportunities to test out how much they have absorbed during a course topic, providing stepped feedback for multiple attempts which may direct them to think about different aspects of a question.

For example:

A summative quiz can capture learner responses to the questions which count towards the completion criteria for a digital badge or course certificate.

For example:

It is really important to think about potential quiz questions while writing or compiling the course rather than leaving the quiz question building until the end of authoring, as there are bound to be opportunities to integrate the quiz into the course and it is easier to do this if you think about how you might ask a question and test understanding from the start rather than bolting it on later. For example the author might write a section and put holding text in the content for activities including quizzes, with rough notes on possible questions to ask. This may also help with writing the content and the perspectives included in the text. Building effective quiz questions is a skill which the author can develop especially if collaborating with others who have experience of what makes a good question which can be answered without writing an essay and which really challenges the learner to think carefully about what they’ve learned.