Question creation with Wiris Quizzes on Moodle for evaluation in sciences

Abstract

Online education grows stronger by the day. The transition from classroom education to the use of an online platform was just a matter of time. Yet, despite the available technologies the transition isn’t the smoothest for some professors and students. Moodle is a free open sourced learning platform developed as a tool to work in benefit of education. It counts with several plugins added by the community for the sole purpose of enhancing long distance education. This paper describes the main tools available for the creation of questions and the design of online evaluations. The effectiveness of these tools is discussed based on their strengths, weaknesses and also the difficulties we may encounter in their application. The topic of current relevance and opens a door to reflect on the handling of these tools and their impact on the teaching-learning process. The Moodle platform, as well as the plugins that are added from the free software community, provide the teacher with several schemes to program questions, and also develop the assessment documents or questionnaire. However, in engineering and science courses a great problem is the implementation of mathematical formulas, since they require a metalanguage that can associate with mathematical language. Both professors and students have to deal with the limitations of the platform in this sense, without an accessible, straightforward and understandable alternative. The challenges that need to be overcome must be faced from an educational and technological standpoint in order to improve the quality of long-distance education. Preliminary experiments show the needs for tools that can be readily applied by any professor without much previous experience, of easy comprehension for the student, and also support the educational process.