Customizing Moodle to include efficient Examination Processes
Project Summary
The scope of this project is to provide an easy customizable environment for faculty and examination controllers to form a database of questions over a Distributed Network (or may be Intranet as well at School) which could be used to generate examination papers for conducting examinations as well as for practice of students. Here, the scope and functions of this system should not be confused with those being provided by Moodle and others; because they aim to automate and facilitate interaction between students and faculty in regards to assignments, etc (through blogs) whereas the proposed system aims to introduce a standalone infrastructure for examinations and other academic analytical activities (online and offline).
The salient features (Goals) of the proposed system
- Providing an inbuilt mechanism to generate evaluation papers such as examination papers with various features and template support having a comprehensive database.
- Providing a Course, Subject and Unit wise Question Bank for students (for practice)
- Providing a scheduling support so that the students can follow up and adhere to course and check out where they stand (similar to Pert and Gantt charts; but with reduced complexities for enabling novoices to use it without any trouble)
- Providing plugin and external tools support for added functionalies
- Providing online examination facility to judge students online
- Storing and publishing the question papers and reports in form of pdfs, doc and other formats
- Providing statistical analysis and related graphical heuristics for analyzing results and patterns
- Providing a mechanism to get feedback of processes through a web interface
- Providing an interface to act as an effective mechanism for intra institutional communication
- Providing system and interface for attendance roster and other such relevant features
The 3-Dimensional structure of System(in terms of interfaces)
The whole system is planned to have a 3-Dimensional structure (in terms of interfaces):
- Administrator (or school management)
- Faculty (or Mentors)
- Students
The above listed features / goals can further be classified for the three dimensions
- Administrator
- Publishing papers, managing templates and the database administration
- Manage all the external tools and plugins
- Managing and supervising question bank and various courses being offered
- Supervise all schedules related to various courses and mentors and handling global variables
- Scheduling and running online examinations
- Manage the allowable formats and access rights to various mentors
- Managing available statistical analysis and external tool support
- Managing Feedback mechanisms and intra institutional communication (via forum and instant notice support)
- Providing an interface to act as an effective mechanism for intra institutional communication
- Faculty (or Mentors)
- Submit questions to the courses assigned to them, choosing difficulty levels and other related properties for each question
- Access to external tools and plugins as embedded by the Administration
- Reviewing question bank generated against their course and answering instant queries by students
- Use easy scheduler to chalk out course schedule for their courses and manage students progress against them
- Viewing statistical analysis and related graphical heuristics for analyzing results and patterns for their courses
- Be a part of feedback mechanism to keep the educational channel interactive and alive
- Students
- Can access Course, Subject and Unit wise Question Bank and solve questions online/offline
- Check scheduler for current assignments (to follow up at moodle) or to check course progress
- Participate in time bound online examinations
- Viewing question papers and question bank in various formats such as pdfs, doc, etc
- View statistical analysis and related graphical heuristics of class / institution
- Feedback about courses, questions and process through relevant interface
Apart from this, an Assistance System (initially a trainer interface) to lead the student through all the features and mechanisms of the system will be incorporated