Search Results (7)

This study investigates how ongoing low-stakes quizzes and other learning management system (LMS)-based activities relate to performance on a summative course quiz in higher education. We analyzed course data from 37 first-year undergraduate students. Data were extracted from Moodle and covered weekly quiz scores across ten quizzes, number of attempts, attempt duration, latency between quiz release and first attempt, and student engagement with course materials. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, and partial correlations were used to examine these relationships. The findings consistently point in the same direction: when and how often students engaged with quizzes mattered far more than how well they scored on them. Longer latency—that is, delaying the first quiz attempt after release—was strongly negatively associated with final quiz performance, while students who attempted quizzes more frequently and completed them more quickly tended to perform better. Among course materials, viewing the core lecture handouts showed the strongest positive association with final scores, while additional reading, Moodle lesson completion, and Padlet participation showed weaker but statistically significant positive associations. Topic materials were not significantly associated with final quiz performance. Partial correlation analyses confirmed that latency, number of attempts, and handout views each remained independently associated with final performance after controlling for average quiz score, suggesting these behavioral indicators capture something that raw accuracy alone does not. These results align with testing-effect and self-regulated learning research and point to a clear practical implication: course designs that encourage early, repeated engagement with structured core materials are likely to support better student outcomes than those that rely primarily on quiz scores as a proxy for learning. Full article

Blended learning has introduced a more accessible and flexible teaching environment in higher education. However, ensuring that content is inclusive, particularly for students with learning difficulties, remains a challenge. This paper explores how Moodle, a widely adopted learning management system (LMS), can support inclusive and adaptive learning based on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. A 16-week descriptive exploratory study was conducted with 70 undergraduate students during a software engineering fundamentals course at Philadelphia University in Jordan. The research combined weekly iterative focus groups, teaching reflections, and interviews with 16 educators to identify and address inclusion barriers. The findings highlight that the students responded positively to features such as conditional activities, flexible quizzes, and multimodal content. A UDL-based framework was developed to guide the design of inclusive Moodle content, and it was validated by experienced educators. To our knowledge, this is the first UDL-based framework designed for Moodle in Middle Eastern computing and engineering education. The findings indicate that Moodle features, such as conditional activities and flexible deadlines, can facilitate inclusive practices, but adoption remains hindered by institutional and workload constraints. This study contributes a replicable design model for inclusive blended learning and emphasizes the need for structured training, intentional course planning, and technological support for implementing inclusivity in blended learning environments. Moreover, this study provides a novel weekly iterative focus group methodology, which enables continuous course refinement based on evolving students’ feedback. Future work will look into generalizing the research findings and transferring the findings to other contexts. It will also explore AI-driven adaptive learning pathways within LMS platforms. This is an empirical study grounded in weekly student focus groups, educator interviews, and reflective teaching practice, offering evidence-based insights on the application of UDL in a real-world higher education setting. Full article

Moodle quizzes are a convenient way of online assessment, benefiting both teachers and students. Unfortunately, their preparation is slow, cumbersome, and error-prone. In addition to the effort of designing the questions, it is necessary to enter them in Moodle. Furthermore, for questions that require images, these must first be created and then uploaded to Moodle. If this process has to be repeated with many questions, the required work becomes prohibitive. This paper presents a tool that solves all these problems, allowing the automatic and massive generation of questions for the evaluation of the knowledge about lexical analysis algorithms. The evaluation of these algorithms is relevant in the subjects of both automata and formal languages and in those of compiler design. The tool allows the creation of exercises of configurable complexity, after which the text, tables, and associated images are generated for quick upload to Moodle. The main impact of this tool is the substantial reduction of question preparation time, reducing hundreds or thousands of interactions with Moodle forms to just a few simple steps. In addition, the ease of question generation makes it possible to prepare self-assessment questionnaires for the students, something that they greatly appreciate as a study aid. Full article

In distance learning educational environments like Moodle, students interact with their tutors, their peers, and the provided educational material through various means. Due to advancements in learning analytics, students’ transitions within Moodle generate digital trace data that outline learners’ self-directed learning paths and reveal information about their academic behavior within a course. These learning paths can be depicted as sequences of transitions between various states, such as completing quizzes, submitting assignments, downloading files, and participating in forum discussions, among others. Considering that a specific learning path summarizes the students’ trajectory in a course during an academic year, we analyzed data on students’ actions extracted from Moodle logs to investigate how the distribution of user actions within different Moodle resources can impact academic achievements. Our analysis was conducted using a Markov Chain Model, whereby transition matrices were constructed to identify steady states, and eigenvectors were calculated. Correlations were explored between specific states in users’ eigenvectors and their final grades, which were used as a proxy of academic performance. Our findings offer valuable insights into the relationship between student actions, link weight vectors, and academic performance, in an attempt to optimize students’ learning paths, tutors’ guidance, and course structures in the Moodle environment. Full article

As the COVID-19 pandemic caused many schools to go online, asynchronous distant learning has become popular. One of the main challenges of asynchronous distance learning is keeping students engaged and motivated, as they do not have the same engagement with their peers and teachers as in traditional face-to-face learning environments. HTML 5 package (H5P) is an interactive learning tool that has the potential to fill this need due to its numerous immediate interactive features, such as interactive videos, pop quizzes, and games during media playback. This study investigates the effectiveness of using H5P and Moodle in asynchronous distance learning environments for undergraduate students. The data collection methods included pre-and post-surveys for Moodle and H5P and the questions related to the student perspectives towards H5P features. The technology acceptance model (TAM) is employed to find student satisfaction. The results of this study suggest that both the H5P and Moodle could be valuable tools for making E-learning more effective. The interactive and engaging nature of H5P can provide students with a more enjoyable and effective learning experience, helping to keep them motivated and engaged throughout their studies. Full article

The use of Moodle quizzes as a continuous assessment and an integral part of the educational methodology in higher education has been analyzed in a case study of physical chemistry subject. Two types of quiz designed with different item types and different settings, called basic quiz (BQ) and thematic block quiz (TBQ), were elaborated making use of a question bank with more than 450 items. BQ has true/false items, while TBQ has randomly mixed items (multiple choice, numerical and matching). The effect of the type of quiz on the student scores is analyzed according to statistical and psychometric data such as the degree of participation, the facility index and the discrimination index of each item, and the average score, calculated according to the classical test theory. This allows us to discern which type of quiz has an enough quality to use it as an assessment tool. Moreover, the effect of this educational activity, developed during the last six academic years from 2014 to 2020, just before of the pandemic situation, is evaluated considering the scores of the students in the Ordinary Calls of exams and comparing them with previous courses taught with a traditional education based on master classes. The statistic results indicate that TBQs are more discriminative than BQs and could be used as an assessment tool, while BQs could be only useful as formative activity. Moodle quizzes turn out to be a reliable strategy for learning of contents in scientific matter, with a high participation in the knowledge tests, with good marks in the average score and a greater number of pass degrees in the Ordinary Calls. Full article

In 2004, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya decided to change one of its critical and strategic information services: the online teaching support platform. An Open Source software, Moodle, was adopted and the previous proprietary software was abandoned. In 2020, the home confinement of the population due to the pandemic caused by COVID-19 has been a stress test for the entire university community, and very specifically by those responsible for providing the support of the online teaching support platform. The increase in activity and the prospect of the generalization of online assessment raised the concerns of possible scalability issues with the quiz functionality during the examination period. The solution applied involved using Moodle’s IMS LTI interoperability features to deploy a high-performance version of the Moodle Quizz Module As A Service (SaaS), to plug-and-play within the university’s LMS without drawing on its internal resources. This solution combined with a systems strategy, private cloud operations, internal communication and teacher training, solved this problem and successfully complete the assessment of the university course in a situation of confinement. Full article