Abstract:

Teachers and students need some time to adapt to the fast and constant advancement of new technologies and the new educational methodologies that arise from these. Hence, it is difficult to make the most of all the possibilities of the technological resources available today that can improve the teaching and learning process.
This is the case of Moodle, an open source learning management system. Generally, the main use of a virtual campus based on Moodle is as a repository. However, another type of interactive learning activities (such as quizzes, forums or lessons) can be performed.

In order to explore how to harness the interactivity of Moodle, in 2012 a master's thesis was carried out for the Master’s Degree in Teacher Training of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC-BarcelonaTech). The main goal of the thesis was the implementation of quizzes aimed at secondary education students, the main results of which are shown in the present work.

A number of Moodle questions has been designed and implemented. This question bank allows to generate collections of quizzes for the subject of mathematics. It consists of multi-level issues, including questions of reinforcement, understanding, application and extension. This is the reason why we can design quizzes from this question bank that respond to different levels of difficulty. Furthermore, due to the large variety of design options offered by Moodle quizzes, questions stored in the question bank can be re-used to build quizzes to be worked in different contexts such as diagnostic and post-performance tests.

The objective of the question bank is to help students to build their learning process from the reflection of their own practice using the Moodle platform. That is, to apply ICT tools in order to promote self-learning (based on practice and error) and to provide, through the various options of the quizzes created with Moodle, the necessary tools for the student to identify and overcome their own limitations.

Moreover, the question bank also aims to facilitate the task of teaching. The preparation of different quizzes, which suit the specific needs of students, helps teachers to teach for diversity. With the help of multi-level questions, teachers have the opportunity to prepare several quizzes (with questions of reinforcement or extension as appropriate) to provide maximum flexibility in the learning process of their students. Additionally, thanks to the automatic correction of quizzes, they become a very efficient tool for the teacher to immediately detect what the weaknesses of each student are. In other words, the quiz activity module provides information of which objectives worked in the classroom during a teaching unit the student has or has not mastered.

Using the question bank created, we designed a quiz that was tested into a school with the collaboration of 40 students. The quiz was used as a self-learning and collaborative activity in the classroom. The analysis of the quiz results allowed to detect which of the objectives worked during the lesson taught could be considered assimilated and which are not.

Once the quiz was performed, the students answered a survey to express their opinion on various aspects of this activity. The vast majority of students rated the quiz positively and they felt that it was a useful learning tool that they would like to use more often.

Keywords:

Moodle Quizzes, Mathematics, Self-learning, Self-evaluation, Constructionism, Collaborative work.