Exercises
The “Exercises” tool offers teacher a range of features related to creating and managing exercises. The initial page of the exercise subsystem displays all course exercises, allowing for their management.
To create an exercise, select the “New exercise” link and then fill in a series of its parameters. Specifically, you will need to define the following parameters:
- Exercise Name: You must enter the name of the exercise.
- Exercise Description: If desired, you can provide a brief description of the exercise.
- Completion Text: This is text that will be displayed to trainees after they complete the exercise.
- Display: Determine whether all exercise questions will appear on one page or one question per page. There's also a new option: “One question per page with no return to previous questions.”
- Grading Scale: Select the appropriate grading scale.
- Start-End: You can set the start and end dates for the validity of this exercise. This parameter is quite useful for examination processes (specific days and times).
- Temporary save: Through this option, you can enable or disable the temporary save for an exercise.
- Time limit: Choose whether you want to set time limits for students to complete your exercise.
- Allowed attempts: Determine how many times the same user can repeat the specific exercise. Here, it's important to note that a value of “0” for allowed attempts corresponds to “infinite” attempts for students to complete the exercise.
- Answers: Choose whether or not you want the exercise results to be displayed at the end, or if the results should be displayed after the student's last attempt. You also have the option to enable the display of answers after the exercise's expiration date.
- Score: Choose whether or not you want the exercise score to be displayed at the end, or if the score should be displayed after the student's last attempt. You also have the option to enable the display of the score after the exercise's expiration date.
- Assign to: This option defines which categories of students will have access to this exercise (all students, specific students, user groups).
- Resume attempt: Here you can define the time period in minutes that a student has available to reconnect and continue completing the specific exercise. This function is activated when a student experiences a computer malfunction during the exercise (network disconnection, power outage).
- Access Password: Determine if you want users to access your exercise via a password.
- Access by Network Address (specific IP(s)): Define the IP addresses you would like to have access to this specific exercise.
- Tags: Associate the current exercise with a tag. This feature is quite useful for searching by tags in the future.
The process of completing the exercise details is finalized by selecting the “Create” link.
At this point, it should be emphasized that if you have created a new exercise to which you haven't yet added any questions, this exercise will be invisible (greyed out). To make it visible, questions must be added as described below.
Next, you need to insert the questions that will be included in this particular exercise. This can be done either by creating a new question or by selecting one from the “Question Bank.”
To create a new question, simply click the “New question” link. Then, select the category your question will belong to. Enter the question's name and, if desired, an optional comment. In the settings for your new question, you are given the option to enter feedback text as shown in the image below.
Determine the question's difficulty using the scroll bar. If your exercise is related to an image, then use the “Browse / Choose file” option to upload the specific image from your local disk to the question. Afterward, select the question type. The available options are:
The process of creating a new question is completed by selecting the link “OK”. When the trainer has created a new exercise then he is given the opportunity to see (preview) the questions and answers of the particular exercise. This is simply done by clicking on the name of the exercise. An example of exercise is given in the figure below.
Here, we need to emphasize whether the trainer wishes to perform the exercise should go to the main page of the exercises and choose the top-right rotation switch (trainer-trainee) and change through this role to a trainee. With this change it is possible to perform the exercise and see the screens that the trainees have access to.