We are happy to announce a major release for StudentQuiz today!

Personal Learning Assistance

While prior versions of StudentQuiz provided students and teachers with insights on the difficulty and rating of questions by the community, our latest release enables every student to compare his own progress with the crowd.
A progress bar indicates how many of the available questions were answered correctly or incorrectly on the latest attempt or not at all by the individual student.
A table of the top 10 ranked students is now featured prominently on the main view as well.

Personalized question table for students

• Difficulty: The number of yellow bolts indicates how difficult this question is for you, the blue bar how difficult the question is for the community. Both values compare the number of correct answers to all answers given to a question.
• Rating: The number of yellow stars represent your own rating, the blue bar in the background the average rating by the community.
• Attempts: The number of your attempts, and a check mark if your last attempt was correct are displayed as well.
• The table is sortable by all of these new values as well.

Fast & personalised filtering

• Every student can now filter by specific values for personal difficulty and rating as well as his number of attempts and the correctness of his latest attempt.
• We provide new fast toggle filters to select a specific set of questions. E.g. with only 4 clicks a student can quickly filter for approved questions, with personal difficulty rating of more than 3 bolts and a crowd difficulty of more than 60%.

Ranking & Points

• A table explains the number of points a teacher awards students in this StudentQuiz activity for creating questions, approvals received, ratings received.
• In prior versions, point settings were set system wide. Now every teacher can configure them on activity level.
• Every student can see how his ranking points are calculated and how these values compare to the top 10 of this course.
• New value: Personal Progress: is defined to be 100% when all available questions have been answered correctly on the latest attempt.

Question types

Teachers can now restrict the allowed question types.

Statistics

We cleaned up the statistics view where every student can compare his efforts with the average values of the crowd.

Notifications

StudentQuiz now sends notifications to a question's author when it gets approved, changed or deleted by a teacher or commented by anyone. It also notifies the author of a comment if it was deleted by a teacher. These notifications should further encourage students to interact with the StudentQuiz activity in a course.

Under the hood

Performance

We significantly reduced the number of database queries StudentQuiz fires on "Start Quiz" or when calculating the ranking table. These changes will have a significant positive impact on the performance for all large-scale sites.

No more hidden sections or hidden Quiz instances

Prior versions of StudentQuiz depended on additional hidden Quiz instances in a hidden section.
We obliterated this dependency, which was a major redesign under the hood.

No more StudentQuiz Question behaviour

With this release StudentQuiz has no dependency on the StudentQuiz Question behaviour any more.
Rating and commenting features are now integrated into StudentQuiz.

No more entries in the gradebook

StudentQuiz no longer produces data for the grade book. We consider a StudentQuiz activity a fun and engaging tool to prepare students for assessments, and not to assess students.

Implementing Backup & Restore for StudentQuiz data

Former releases of StudentQuiz didn't implement the backup of rating, comment and question approval data, which are now backuped and therefore restorable.

Sophisticated upgrade & cleanup

Although this is a major update we implemented an upgrade procedure to migrate existing attempt and rating data generated with StudentQuiz activities with prior versions to our new data structure.
Also, if a course backup made with an older version of StudentQuiz gets restored, we cleanup the infamous 990+ empty sections automatically now. During the upgrade process, StudentQuiz tries to uninstall the StudentQuiz Question behaviour plugin.

Minor features

• Pagination size: The pagination size of the question table can now be set to the desired value.
• Tags are now displayed in the original case, so lowercase, CamelCase or UPPERCASE tags are displayed as such. Filtering by tags continues to be case insensitive.
• Questions can be moved up and down the category hierarchy by users with capabilities. (#24)
• Fixed a lot of small bugs.
• 100% translatable: Every string is now translatable with AMOS.

Thanks

We thank the Moodle community for all your helpful issue reports leading up to this release and all the continuous efforts by the AMOS translators.