Abstract:

During the covid crisis many educators have been challenged by the necessity of distance learning. Different software tools have been used during this time. We present our experience with online assignments and assessments in Moodle system. One of advantages of Moodle system is that it allows creation of quizzes where for each student are questions filled into quiz randomly from a pool of questions. Moodle system is widespread and used by many institutions on various levels of education. In fact, other reason for us to consider Moodle system was that our institution was already working with this system even before the crisis.
We present our challenges from mathematical point of view as our background in mathematics. For this reason, we start by discussing possibilities of writing mathematical expressions in Moodle system. We also mention software or other issues which came up during our experience.

Our other topic focuses on Moodle quiz. We show how to create short quizzes and give various examples how to apply this for students in undergraduate level. Usually, teacher comes into close contact with students during lessons and is able to assess their weaknesses and progress. Moreover, this allows teacher to discover which students need perhaps more attention and advises. However, during distance education we have been separated from our students for almost a whole year. For this reason, we have created many short Moodle quizzes which allowed us to observe their progress. As a bonus we were able to give more ambitious students wide range of examples to polish their abilities on.

Questions are filled into Moodle quiz from a pool of questions. Creating these questions is little bit tedious as they have to be usually created on server through browser. This demands lots of saving of the progress and other time consuming tasks. For this reason, we show a relatively new way how to create questions in more elegant manner by utilization of LaTeX and its new package. One advantage of this approach is that this gives us a pdf file with all the questions so that we can correct problematic questions all at once. Similar thing can be probably done in Moodle system as well, however with a lot of additional work.

Keywords:

Moodle, online assessment, distance education, undergraduate mathematics, quizzes.