Moodle tests: not so much of a fuss when you have R

Abstract

One of the least motivating parts of the teaching-learning process is evaluation. It is a task done with some periodicity and one of the aspects that teachers seek to improve. In higher education institutions, evaluation consolidates the learning process and it is an important tool that permits the accountability and certification of the results. During that process teachers aim to achieve equity, suitability, reliability, and efficiency. The preparation of different components of evaluation is one of the most time-consuming activities and so it is highly desirable to reduce the time used in that process, namely, in the preparation of written exams. All over the world, educational institutions of all degrees have adopted some mixed models of communications between the agents of the process of learning-teaching. The digital way is largely spread using suitable platforms. One of the top preferences among a great part of those institutions is Moodle. Moodle provides some tools to perform formative as well as summative evaluation. We've seen how Pandemic disease increased the need for the use of such tools. Recent studies show new problems raised with home evaluation tests, one of which is the easier possibility of fraud. As a response to this problem, one can increase the number of different questions presented to different students. With particularly advantages to statistics teachers (familiarized with R), the R package exams is a powerful tool that provides some answers to those problems: it produces questions that can be exported directly to Moodle quiz format (as well as in paper format) and it allows for random generation of parametrized questions. This way, one rapidly obtain a number of multiple questions, all of them with the same level of difficulty and related to the same topics, ready to include in the Moodle bank of questions. This paper aims to show how these tools combined with latex and markdown environments may contribute to help Statistics teacher's activity.