• Integrating quizzes into teaching

    Integrating quizzes into teaching

    Quizzes, polls, Q&A and word clouds are great ways to engage the audience of your course. They can be used to gauge preliminary knowledge, test understanding, provide feedback or simply as an icebreaker. They are also great ways to engage members of the audience who wouldn’t normally ask questions. This could be for many reasons, including English not being their first language, difficulties with connectivity or a dislike of public speaking.

    There are a range of different software options available that will enable you to embed quizzes and other interactive functions into your teaching. These include software such as Mentimeter and Slid.do. PowerPoint also has integrated software - Classpoint, but it is not currently available for Macs. There are a range of guides on how to create useful audience engagement resources, such as Mentimeter's presentation tips.   

    It is important that if you are sharing your presentation for reuse that a separate list of questions and answers is available to enable other instructors to set up their own versions of your engagement activities.


    Moodle quizzes

    Instructors can use quizzes in Moodle to evaluate student understanding of material. Moodle quizzes consist of a Quiz activity that contains one or more questions from your course's Question bank. The Quiz activity allows you to administer a wide range of questions within a specific layout and order, provide different kinds of feedback based on how a student performs on the quiz, and control the ways students can access the quiz. The Question bank is an organized repository for all the questions in your course, separate from any quiz activities that might use them. Moodle also provides separate tools dedicated to taking surveys and polls, rather than assessing students. 

    Take a few minutes to explore the different question types available in Moodle. 


    Quiz design
    Learning about what makes good question design will make your course materials more effective and more accurately measure learning. This video (13 mins) is a really good introduction to one of the most common question types - multiple choice questions. It gives a good overview of how to create questions that can't just be guessed and which test different levels of knowledge and relates this to Bloom's taxonomy.