3ET: Moodle

Many teaching institutions use Moodle. According to the website, “Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System. It has become very popular among educators around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic websites for their students. To work, it needs to be installed on a web server somewhere, either on one of your own computers or one at a web hosting company.”

One of the many splendid features of Moodle is its ability to build a bank of questions from which a teacher can create exercises or exams for students.

3ET has an export facility that enables a teacher to generate a number of language questions and export them to the Moodle question bank. Before the questions are transferred to Moodle, the teacher can review the questions and perhaps delete any question that is deemed unsuitable for the purpose.

Note: This example is in Hebrew, but the exact same principles can be used if you want to create Moodle questions in Greek. So please read on, even if you are only interested in Greek.

In this example, we shall create an exercise in the identification of the stem of Hebrew verbs. We shall then export a number of questions to Moodle’s question bank. In order to complete this example, you need a teacher’s account on a Moodle server.

We have previously seen how you create an exercise. We shall therefore here only quickly go through the creation of the exercise:

Select the menu item File > New exercise > Hebrew (Simple, WIVU, Genesis 1-3).
Select the “Universe” tab. Tick “Everything”.
Select the “Sentences” tab. We want to find sentences containing verbs, and to ensure that the questions are not too boring, we will exclude the qal stem, to which most verbs belong. Therefore, select the “Part of speech” feature and tick “Verb”; then select “Stem”, mark ≠ (different from), and tick “Qal”. Now remove the tick next to “Use this for sentence unit selection”.
Select the “Sentence Units” tab. We want the student to consider all verbs in the sentence, including any qal form that may occur in the chosen sentences. Therefore, select the “Part of speech” feature and tick “Verb”.
Select the “Features” tab. Place a mark in the “Show” column next to the “Text” feature and in the “Request” column next to “Stem”.
If you wish, save the exercise using the File > Save exercise menu item.

You are now ready to generate a set of questions for Moodle. Select the menu item Run > Generate question set. The program will now find five random sentences that meet the specified criteria:

Notice the scrollbar in the right hand side of the window; the window contains five questions even if you currently see only about 1½. Every single question can be tested as we have seen earlier, but there are a few new items in this page:

Every question has a name. This is used to identify the question in Moodle’s question bank. How you wish to name your questions is up to up. 3ET suggest the not very informative names “Question 1”, “Question 2” etc.
Every question has a title. This is shown as a headline when Moodle shows the question to a student. You can choose to give a title to all questions; or can just give the first question a title, which will then automatically be used for the other questions. In this example, a title such as “What is the verbal stem?” may be appropriate.
Below every question there is a “Delete question” button. You can use this to remove a question from the collection. There may be several reasons why want to do so. Perhaps the sentence is ambiguous, or perhaps the sentence contains a special case which the students are not expected to know.
In the lower right corner there is a button marked “Add 5 questions”. If you press this button, 3ET will add five more questions to the ones already generated.
In the lower right corner there is a button marked “Save”. It is used to export the questions to Moodle.

When you are satisfied with the set of questions and when you have given the first question (or all of them) a title, you may press the “Save” button in the lower right corner. This will allow you to save the set of questions as a so-called XML file. Please remember what you call the file and where it is stored.

Log in to you teacher’s account on a Moodle server and find the question bank. How this is done depends on how the server is set up. If necessary, ask the system administrator of your Moodle server. The course page may look like this:

On this server the question bank is available under “Questions” in the block “Administration” in the left column. Click the link and you will get access to the question bank. It may look like this:

Select the “Import” tab:

Under “File format”, select “Moodle XML format”. Under “General” further down the page, select whatever is appropriate for your course. Under “Import from file upload...” use the browse function to select the XML file you created using 3ET. Finally, press “Upload this file”.

For your information, Moodle shows you an overview of the imported questions:

Press the “Continue” button at the bottom of this page. This will return you to the question bank:

Here you see an overview of the questions now available in the question bank. You will recognise the intelligent names “Question 1”, “Question 2” etc. As a teacher, you may try out a question by clicking the small Preview icon. Question 1 may look like this:

This corresponds to the question as it appeared in 3ET (see the first picture on this page).

You may read more about how to use Moodle’s question bank here.

A Couple of Warnings

There are a few things you should be aware of when transferring questions from 3ET to Moodle:

Under preferences you can choose what font to use when Moodle shows questions that originate in 3ET. You should, however, note that even if a certain font is installed on your computer, it may not be available or a student’s computer. It may be a good idea to stick to well-known fonts such as Times New Roman, which is available on most Windows computers.

We have previously seen how students can write Hebrew or Greek even if they only have a keyboard with Latin characters. This is not possible with Moodle. If a question requires the typing of a Greek or Hebrew text, Moodle assumes that the student is able to type this text in the original language. There are various solutions to this problem: You may copy and paste from texts in the original language, or you can use the EzerKb program. Perhaps your teaching institution has a tool that suits you for this purpose. Otherwise, you may have to stick to multiple choice questions as we have seen in this example.

Go to main page Updated: 2009-11-26 10:56:26