Yacapaca

I was collecting a few more quizzes for my E-Safety course last night, when I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Although quite a few of the quiz authors have produced quizzes that include specific issues such as Facebook, cyberbullying, chatrooms and viruses, nobody has produced specific quizzes that concentrate on single e-safety issues. That seemed like an omission worth fixing, though I didn’t want to spend more than an hour.

Here is what I did.

1. I opened each of the existing quizzes in Edit, and went through tagging the questions with each of my keywords. The pro tip is to use browser search to find the keyword, or a stem of the keyword (e.g. ‘cyber’ for cyberbullying). This lets you tag questions accurately but very quickly.
2. Moving to my My Quizzes page, I created a new quiz with the title Staying safe on Facebook. Finding questions to add to it was easy because I had just tagged a load of questions with the ‘facebook’ tag. I had to go back a couple of times, and ended up collecting 18 questions from across 3 pages. It’s amazing how many there are available!
3. Having compiled the quiz (never forget the Compile/Recompile button!), I edited a few of the questions to improve the feedback or simply correct spellings. I also threw out a couple of questions that on reflection appeared to be near duplicates of better alternatives. I could have done a lot more, but I didn’t want to spend more than 10 minutes editing each quiz. Finally I recompiled, and edited the parameters to show only 12 (at random) of the 16 remaining questions.
4. I did the same for cyberbullying, chatrooms and viruses.
5. Finally, back to the Course page, I used the Add a Quiz button to add each of my new quizzes in turn.

Notice that I did not write any new questions. Honestly, I didn’t need to! The question bank is large enough now that it contains great, or at least promising and improvable, questions on almost everything. The new question search makes it easy to find, check and select just the ones I want.

I have no idea if anyone is going to use the new quizzes. If they do, I will be able to use the results data to spot and improve weak questions. And if not, never mind. I had fun compiling them.

P.S. the appellation “Author” really doesn’t apply to the owners of courses any more. In my case I authored neither the quizzes nor their component questions, but merely selected them. I plan to change it to the more honest “Collated by”.

See more recent posts tagged “authoring”