Moodle Activity – Create a reverse quiz

In this activity we’re going to reverse things a bit.  This time the students are going to create the quiz and the teacher is going to take the quiz.

This activity can be done as a whole class or in groups depending on the size of the class.

To set this up requires a bit of poking around with Moodle’s Roles system but it’s not that hard.  Once you’ve set up the basics of the quiz,  go into the tab ‘Locally Assigned Roles‘ and set up the students as teachers and yourself as a student (don’t worry,  this will only be for this activity,  not the whole course).  Now the students can create the quiz and you can take the quiz.

From here you can be creative on how you do the rest but I’ll illustrate the way I’d approach it.

 

Organisation

I’m a big fan of getting people to plan and think about what it is they are about to do.  The first part of the activity is getting the students to set up a structure for managing themselves (and which I can keep track of).  This is up to them and I will create whatever activities they require for this.  They could make use of the following Moodle activities:

• Forum – good way to discuss things
• Wiki – good way to collate material as they go
• Trackpad – good for organising tasks and keeping track of progress
• Assignment – they could use this as a dropbox for people to submit ideas.
• etc

Whatever they come up with I will implement for them but they are made aware that some of the marks the get relate to how effective their collaboration system is and how well they use it.

 

Running

Then I give them an outline for the quiz as follows:

• The quiz must be 20 questions
• The questions can be of any format available in the quiz activity
• You will get bonus marks for making use of the feedback feature,  especially per question,  but only if it is constructive feedback (“congratulations,  you are correct” is not constructive feedback)
• If you can construct a quiz that has fair,  on topic questions,  and I cannot get above 80% (and your question answers are correct) you will also get bonus marks and another prize (chocolates are always a winner).

I think this creates an environment which is fun and motivating for the students.  Because they can come up with their own collaboration system they already have ownership.   They also can be creative in the questions they set up and will spend a bit of time debating which questions should go into the final quiz.  There is the added incentive to not just put in basic,  boring questions so now as we are learning the material they will be more alert.  They are on the lookout for those obscure yet important facts and theories they can include in the quiz and this is keeping them more attentive.

I will perform the quiz myself in class.  I will use this as a revision activity and will use each question as stimulus for discussion. eg

Hmmm…. this is an interesting question.  Now the answer definitely can’t be C.  Can anyone tell me why this would be the case?  I’m not sure if it is option A or D but I was reading a rather interesting article about D last night on Wikipedia,  they were talking about…. which is most interesting….  And so on.

I might even get the odd question wrong on purpose just to build the suspense.