Quizzes and Course Status

[donnied]

We have developed some courses that include quizzes (created using Quiz Manager). However, we are finding that significant numbers of people who take the courses are failing the quizzes for reasons other than the fact they do not select the correct answers. For example, if a person reviews a quiz they have already passed using the navigation buttons, that is counted as a failed attempt. Of course, they should review the quiz in Review mode, but people will always find a way to navigate a GUI in ways that you do not expect or recommend. The status of a course with quizzes depends on the response to those quizzes, so when a person “fails” a quiz, they cannot pass the course, and get very frustrated as a result.

As our quizzes are only really included for some interactivity, and the results are essentially meaningless (to us), we were wondering if there was any way to “decouple” the status of a course from the results of any quiz that may be embedded within it. That is, even if you fail all the quizzes in a particular course, the status of that course will depend on some other parameter – slide views for example – and not on the quiz results. In other words, even if a person failed every quiz in a particular course (for whatever reason), their status for that course would be “Complete” if they looked at a certain percentage of the slides in the course. Many thanks in advance for any advice.

[James_the_SciTrainer]

Set the passing score to 0

[donnied]

Thanks for that James - that certainly works, and is something we are prepared to go with. There is a slight drawback though, with a passing score of zero, a user only has to open the course for its status to change to Passed. The course reports will be based on this "attempt", and are not updated because the status is changed to Passed. As a result, the number of attempts for all users is reported as one, and as the reporting data just relates to the first attempt, it is not an accurate indication of a user’s interaction with the course.

However, I don’t think there’s an alternative with the current version of Connect, and we will change the passing score to zero for all our courses. Thanks again.

[Guest]

You could also use survey/ungraded questions. I don't know if you can give feedback based on right/wrong then, but you can certainly mark the questions as required. Just a thought.

[donnied]

Thanks T, you are right - unfortunately survey questions do not give you the feedback based on the right or wrong answer, the default behavior is just to move to the next slide, without any message being displayed.

You could create a separate "Correct" slide, and use the Advanced options to move to it when the correct option is selected, but then you have to create Incorrect slides also. In addition, this "hack" would only work for single answer questions.

Looks as if I have to keep the score at zero, for now (although somebody mentioned that PowerPoint 2007 has some pretty nice question templates, I must check that out - perhaps I can create my questions without using QM at all...)

Thanks again for your feedback, much appreciated.

[Guest]

Hi Donnied,

First off, apologies for the *very* late response; I just realized the date stamp on this one, but nevertheless I'm going to throw my 2 cents in here...

Before I start, let me ask you this: when you set up the course(s) and configured the settings for results, what options did you set? Here's why I ask:

Although there are a variety of report data sets that can be exported from a viewed presentation, when it comes to capturing user interactivity without the need to weigh responses (this is commonly referred to as a "knowledge check"--meaning that the learner is tested on some aspect of comprehension without really scoring the result) what we've done in the past is set the report data to "report slide views only". This way, a couple of things are tracked:

1. The learner's entry / exit points in a presentation
2. Answers to question slides, and even if, as Jim suggested, they're set to a passing score of 0, there will be no indication of "failure" to the learner...more on this in a moment...

Caveat: we've found that the "slide view completion" only really makes sense if its set to 100%. Anything less than that is kind of a waste. Net effect here is that IF the learner bails on a presentation half-way through, that gets reported back to the LMS as an "incomplete". Admininstration loves that because they can tally who has gone through a presentation and can follow up with those who haven't.

As far as learners receiving messages of "failing" a presentation, it might also make sense to forget using the "show score at end of quiz" feature, especially if the pass/fail option is set to 0 anyway.

One thing to keep in mind with "questions" that are available within PowerPoint directly: some, if not all, are dependant upon Microsoft's internal VBasic code base and Active X controls. Especially in cases where you could use ppt's action buttons, when publishing, they simply won't work.

Rob

[Guest]

Hi Donnied,

First off, apologies for the *very* late response; I just realized the date stamp on this one, but nevertheless I'm going to throw my 2 cents in here...

Before I start, let me ask you this: when you set up the course(s) and configured the settings for results, what options did you set? Here's why I ask:

Although there are a variety of report data sets that can be exported from a viewed presentation, when it comes to capturing user interactivity without the need to weigh responses (this is commonly referred to as a "knowledge check"--meaning that the learner is tested on some aspect of comprehension without really scoring the result) what we've done in the past is set the report data to "report slide views only". This way, a couple of things are tracked:

1. The learner's entry / exit points in a presentation
2. Answers to question slides, and even if, as Jim suggested, they're set to a passing score of 0, there will be no indication of "failure" to the learner...more on this in a moment...

Caveat: we've found that the "slide view completion" only really makes sense if its set to 100%. Anything less than that is kind of a waste. Net effect here is that IF the learner bails on a presentation half-way through, that gets reported back to the LMS as an "incomplete". Admininstration loves that because they can tally who has gone through a presentation and can follow up with those who haven't.

As far as learners receiving messages of "failing" a presentation, it might also make sense to forget using the "show score at end of quiz" feature, especially if the pass/fail option is set to 0 anyway.

One thing to keep in mind with "questions" that are available within PowerPoint directly: some, if not all, are dependant upon Microsoft's internal VBasic code base and Active X controls. Especially in cases where you could use ppt's action buttons, when publishing, they simply won't work.

Rob

[donnied]

Hi Rob,

Sorry for the long delay in replying to you, I was out of the office for a while.

Many thanks for your comprehensive reply.

In response to your question about which options we set, I am assuming that you mean which options we set on the Reporting tab in Quiz Manager. I should have mentioned this explicitly, but we are deploying all our presentations to a Breeze server. Therefore, we ignore the settings on the Reporting tab, as Adobe have indicated to us that these have no effect in our case, in their words:

“When Presenter-generated content is launched from the Breeze server, the content detects it is communicating with a Breeze server and sets certain reporting options automatically. In particular, all the options under Quiz Manager->Reporting have no effect for Presentations running under the Breeze server. These options are for use when running Presenter-generated content under a non-Breeze LMS.”

So I guess our solution is to deploy the Presenter-generated content under a non-Breeze LMS! I presume this is what you are doing – it certainly seems as if you can configure the quizzes in the way we want.

Thanks for that tip on disabling the "show score at end of quiz" feature, we will certainly do this. I think we will just have some kind of generic message at the end of each quiz.

And thanks for the head’s up on the questions within PowerPoint; I had a feeling these would not be published easily! We would prefer to continue to use Quiz Manager if possible. Hopefully future Connect releases will improve its functionality.

Really appreciate you taking the time to reply.