Adding Activities

Activities, such as forums, quizzes and wikis enable interactive content to be added to the course. Some are only suitable for a tutor/teacher supported course (tutor only) rather than a free standing open educational resource.

  • Blog allows for creation of blogs within a course (tutor only)
  • Choice enables a tutor to ask a question and offer possible responses (tutor only)
  • Custom Certificate is your preferred design, rather than standard Statement of Participation
  • Forum provides a discussion Moodle forum facility (tutor only)
  • Glossary can be a list of definitions, like a dictionary, or resources for information.  
  • H5P HTML5 Package of interactive content (presentations, videos, multimedia, questions etc).
  • Lesson enables sharing content and/or practice activities in flexible ways (tutor only). 
  • Questionnaire allows survey construction using a variety of survey question types.
  • Quiz enables a course author to create quizzes comprising questions of various types.
  • SCORM package Shareable Content Object Reference Model collection of files.   
  • StudentQuiz allows students to add questions for the crowd (tutor only).
  • Wiki lets users edit a set of linked pages, often a collaborative activity (tutor only). 
  • Workshop enables collection, review and peer assessment of students' work (tutor only)


8. Quiz

8.5. Setting up a new quiz

In the course, when in edit mode, in the appropriate topic section of the course, click on ‘add an activity or resource’.

The ‘add an activity or resource’ screen will appear.

Click on Quiz (do not select StudentQuiz as this is a quite different type of activity in which students suggest quiz questions, so it must be moderated by a teacher).

The Adding a new Quiz screen will appear.

Give the quiz a name and add some information about the quiz into the description box. This is where you can explain the purpose of the quiz and how it works, whether the quiz has a pass grade (and if so, what the pass grade is, for example 50%) and whether the learner can attempt the whole quiz more than once (and therefore, if there is any enforced time delay between attempts).

If there is no grade to pass, you can leave that at 0.00 in the Grade to pass box (if there is a pass grade, you can set that later, once all the quiz questions have been set up).

Set the quiz behaviour. For information, all OpenLearn courses use Interactive with multiple tries question behaviour rather than Immediate feedback or Deferred feedback question behaviour.

Set the Review options. For a quiz with interactive with multiple tries behaviour, the review options are usually set as follows:

  • During the attempt – whether correct, marks, specific feedback, general feedback
  • Immediately after the attempt – the attempt, whether correct, marks, specific feedback, general feedback, overall feedback
  • Later when the quiz is still open – the attempt, whether correct, marks, specific feedback, general feedback, overall feedback

If there is no grade to pass, you can leave the Overall feedback box blank. The Overall feedback boxes are very useful for providing different feedback at various grade boundaries (such as a congratulatory message above the pass grade boundary and a ‘try again once course content has been revisited’ message for a below the pass grade boundary).

If you want to set up a time delay between attempts of a quiz (to encourage learners to review material before they attempt the quiz again), you set this via ‘Extra restrictions on attempts’.

For a quiz without a pass grade, set the quiz activity completion to ‘require grade’.

If you decide to set a pass grade, then you also need to check the ‘require passing grade’ box for activity completion. 

Please note: it is not possible for a learner to access the quiz without enrolling on the course, and it is not possible to achieve a grade for a quiz without viewing the quiz, so it is not necessary to set ‘require view’ for quiz activity completion if the ‘require grade’ option is selected.

Click on ‘Save and display’.

Your empty quiz will now appear, ready for you to add questions to it. You can edit the quiz settings any time until you make the quiz available to learners, after that it isn’t advisable to make any changes to the quiz settings as this may cause problems for learners who have completed the quiz.