Using ‘GIFTr’ Package To Prepare ‘MOODLE’ Quiz from Spreadsheet

What is GIFTr?

GIFTr package in intended to help course creators to upload questions to MOODLE and other LMS for quizzes. GIFTr takes dataframe or tibble of questions of four types: mcq, numerical questions, true or false and short answer,and export it a text file formatted in MOODLE GIFT format. You can prepare a spreadsheet in any software and import it in R and generate any number of questions with HTML, markdown and LATEX support.

Aim of this document

The aim of vignette is to highlight the most useful features of GIFTr in preparing a flexible MOODLE quiz as quick as possible with the lowest possibility of errors.

Before you start.

Before going through this tutorial you should have: - R installed - spreadsheet application, like MS Excel, Google Sheets, Libre Calc …etc.

How to start your quiz spreadsheet?

The data passed would differ slightly according to question type, however generally you need to have:-

• a column contains question. This cannot contain empty values
• answer(s) column(s). This may be multiple columns if you have multiple answers. If you mix single and multiple answer it is better to write the single answer in the first column. If you have only single answer MCQ and NO multiple answer MCQ, you can set the answers without asterisk in the first column of the answers columns. More details in the vignette and below.
• a column specifying the type of question. The current supported questions are MCQ, numerical entry, true or false and short answer questions. The should be named ‘mcq’ , ‘num_q’ , ‘tf_q’ and ‘short_ans’ respectively.
• a column specifying categories and subcategories in the MOODLE categories are important when you are preparing a quiz as you may want to specify certain proportions of inclusions. Categories and subcategories are spaced by forward slash like Categ1/subcateg1/subsubcateg1 …etc.
• a column specifying question names. So you can easily enter a certain question names by like certain ID or keyword to make the questions easily on the system. however you don’t need to worry about that as automatically if not set, the first 40 letter are set a question name.

Here is what your spreadsheet heading should look like.

Import to R

It doesn’t matter how you import to R, you can use readxl package or read.csv() or what ever you like to import your spreadsheet as dataframe or tibble. A build-in data called GIFTrData is implemented here as example of spreadsheet after importing.

library(GIFTr)
head(GIFTrData)

##     categories names                                          question
## 1    Ques/hist    Q1                 Who's buried in **Grant's tomb**?
## 2    Ques/hist    Q2 What two people are entombed in **Grant's tomb?**
## 3    Ques/hist    Q3       Grant was buried in a tomb in New York City
## 4 Ques/science    Q4                        The sun rises in the West.
## 5    Ques/hist    Q5                     Who's buried in Grant's tomb?
## 6    Ques/math    Q6                               Two plus two equals
##        A
## 1 *Grant
## 2 No one
## 3      T
## 4      F
## 5  Grant
## 6   four
##                                                                                   B
## 1 no one#Was true for 12 years, but Grant's remains were buried in the tomb in 1897
## 2                                                                            *Grant
## 3                                                                              <NA>
## 4                                                                              <NA>
## 5                                                                  Ulysses S. Grant
## 6                                                                                 4
##                                  C                                  D
## 1 Napoleon#He was buried in France Churchill#He was buried in England
## 2                    *Grant's wife                     Grant's father
## 3                             <NA>                               <NA>
## 4                             <NA>                               <NA>
## 5                             <NA>                      Ulysses Grant
## 6                             <NA>                               <NA>
##                                       E question_type
## 1 Mother Teresa#She was buried in India           mcq
## 2                                  <NA>           mcq
## 3                                  <NA>          tf_q
## 4                                  <NA>          tf_q
## 5                                  <NA>     short_ans
## 6                                  <NA>     short_ans

str(GIFTrData)

## 'data.frame':    11 obs. of  9 variables:
##  $ categories   : chr  "Ques/hist" "Ques/hist" "Ques/hist" "Ques/science" ...
##  $ names        : chr  "Q1" "Q2" "Q3" "Q4" ...
##  $ question     : chr  "Who's buried in **Grant's tomb**?" "What two people are entombed in **Grant's tomb?**" "Grant was buried in a tomb in New York City" "The sun rises in the West." ...
##  $ A            : chr  "*Grant" "No one" "T" "F" ...
##  $ B            : chr  "no one#Was true for 12 years, but Grant's remains were buried in the tomb in 1897" "*Grant" NA NA ...
##  $ C            : chr  "Napoleon#He was buried in France" "*Grant's wife" NA NA ...
##  $ D            : chr  "Churchill#He was buried in England" "Grant's father" NA NA ...
##  $ E            : chr  "Mother Teresa#She was buried in India" NA NA NA ...
##  $ question_type: chr  "mcq" "mcq" "tf_q" "tf_q" ...

GIFTr Function

GIFTr() function is the main function of GIFTr Package. It arguments are:- - data: dataframe or tibble of the questions data - questions: name or index of the questions column - answers: a vector of names or indices of answers column(s) - categories: name or index of categories column if available, Default: NULL - question_name: Default is NULL and you don’t have to pass it. If you want them, it will be name or index of the questions names column. If NULL, it will be the first 40 letters of the question title. - question_type name or index of the questions type column. - mcq_answer_column: This parameter you can use on GIFTrData_2 as the answers of MCQs are in the first column and you have not multiple answer mcq. Default: FALSE - output: directory of .txt file name the questions will be exported to. The generated text will be appended to this file if it is already there, if not a new file will be created.

GIFTr::GIFTr(data = GIFTrData, question_names = 2, 
             questions = 3, answers = c(4:8), 
             categories = 1, question_type = 9,
            output = file.path(tempdir(), "quiz.txt"))  

## Total Number of Questions passed: 11

## 
## ====
## ====
## ====
## ====

## MCQ questions input count: 2 
## MCQ questions with single answer passed: 1 
## MCQ questions with multiple answers passed: 1 
## Error found: 0 
## No valid question found : 0 
## No valid answer found: 0

## 
## ====
## ====
## ====
## Done MCQ!
## ===

## Numerical questions input count: 5 
## Numerical questions with single answer passed: 4 
## Numerical questions questions with multiple answers passed: 1 
## Error found: 0 
## No valid question found : 0 
## No valid answer found: 0

## 
## ====
## ====
## ====
## Done Numerical questions!
## ====

## total short answer questions passed is 2. 
## Valid answer: 2 
## error in 0 
## 0 no question has been found 
## 0 no valid answer has been found

## 
## ====
## ====
## ====
## Done Short Answer questions!
## ====

## T/F questions passed input: 2 
## T/F questions Passed: 2 
## Error found: 0 
## No question found : 0 
## No valid answer found: 0

## 
## ====
## ====
## ====
## Done T/F questions!
## ====

Now you have a file called quiz.txt in temporary directory that has the questions ready to be imported by MOODLE. You can simply use only “quiz.txt” to make the file permanent in the home directory.

You can also use specific functions if your dataframe holds only one type of questions. Check the documentation mcq(), num_q, tf_q() and short_ans() functions.