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Version 2.0
From Qedoc
Release date: 24th September, 2007
Contents |
Activities and module structure
Structural reshaping of modules
Version 1.0 of the Qedoc Quiz Player had a 5-fold structure on its interface: welcome, presentation, assessment, results, community. In version 2.0, this has been reduced to three: welcome, activities, results. Presentations and assessments will be combined into the new activities structure (see below), with existing presentations inserted as the first activity before the list of quizzes. The community section will be subsumed into the results section.
Activities
The way in which the Qedoc Quiz Maker creates presentations and assessments will be revised.
- Presentations will no longer be separately defined from any other kind of thing. Presentations will consist of elements defined in the question bank (usually one of the five existing presentation page types, but could also be interactive elements). A presentation will simply be one among several kinds of activity.
- Assessments (or quizzes) will become another kind of activity. Activities will mostly consist of quizzes and presentations (or lessons), but may also include new activity types such as surveys (vaguely supported up to now but never really used), revision tests (defined entirely differently from the conventional quiz), writing assignments.
Backwards compatibility
Version 2.0 will have two kinds of backwards compatibility.
- Version 1.x modules, with separate presentations, will be converted at runtime, so that they can be played in the Qedoc Quiz Player as if they were version 2.0 modules.
- It will probably be possible to play version 2.0 modules in older versions of the Qedoc Quiz Player.
The activity bank
The Qedoc Quiz Maker will have a new activity bank in a separate tab, rather like the question bank. Authors can create a new activity and glue elements from the question bank together here. There will be a tabular list of activities, which can, like questions, be marked as pending, or reordered. An activity becomes a movable, redefinable and reusable building block from which a module is constructed - much more flexible than the current levels.
The activity bank will add numerous additional configuration options for activities. It will also offer additional information previously inaccessible, such as numbers of questions and available points.
The activity menu
The activity menu is the part of the Qedoc Quiz Player where the learner can choose from a list of available quizzes or other activities. In version 2.0, the activity menu has the following new features:
- Activities can be arranged in multiple columns.
- Detailed descriptions can be added to the short title of each activity.
- The short title of each activity can be accompanied by an image, in which case the "icon-title" combination turns into a button which can be pressed to access the activity.
- Activity menu fonts can be defined.
Activity instructions
The automatically generated page of instructions which used to precede each activity is now optional. In addition, the default setting is for the instructions not to display. The general idea is that in future, authors will use the enhanced range of question types (which include presentation pages) to define their own instructions and insert these as the first item in a quiz.
Scoring
- The activity bank will calculate and display the minimum and maximum scores available in an activity, taking into account all possible combinations of random questions pulled from a larger bank.
- Task score scaling. The activity bank will allow the points for each individual question to be scaled out of a constant value. Quizzes with different scores for each question can be set, for a specific activity, to behave as if each question had the same score attached. This forces all questions to have identical weight in the overall score.
- Activity score scaling. The activity bank will also allow a fixed maximum score for the activity as a whole. The raw total score will be scaled up or down in proportion to this maximum score. This means that points set for each question are no longer absolute values; instead they are relative values which determine the relative weight of the questions in the final outcome.
Ergonomy
Revision of toolbars and menu system
The Qedoc Quiz Maker's toolbars and menu systems have been completely revised to provide better access to frequently needed or difficult-to-find functions.
In addition, the toolbars now have labels. A right-click context menu on the toolbars allows labels to be removed (or reinserted). The toolbar preferences are stored between sessions.
Flying tables
Property tables for editing questions such as multiple choice and gapfill can now be undocked. Undocking is a one-click procedure which moves the table to the centre of the screen and enlarges it for easier editing. A re-dock button allows redocking.
Enlarged editing fields
Every text component in the Qedoc Quiz Maker, including the smallest text fields, now has an additional context menu function which launches an enlarged editing box for easier editing of the contents of the text component.
Internationalisation
Internationalisation is an ongoing theme in almost all updates to our software. In version 2.0 we have added right-to-left component orientation to multiple choice questions. Right-to-left component orientation helps speakers of languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. In addition, language packs for Russian and Portuguese have been added.
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