R/exams: Open-ended questions with exams2moodle

Question

My goal is to create a question using R/exams and Moodle including a few plots generated in the Rmd exercise file. The students should describe the plots verbally and then the exercise is graded manually.

Is it possible to use exams2moodle to create such an open-ended free text question for Moodle? There is no extype for it. In the documentation the only hint is: "In order to generate free text questions in moodle one may specify extra parameters via \exextra. Currently the following options are supported:".

I have tried to add \exextra parameters to the metainformation, but it did not change anything.

Answer 1

A worked example can be found in the essayreg exercise shipped within the package, see: http://www.R-exams.org/templates/essayreg/

And you are right that this is not very well documented. The reason is that we have used somewhat different exextra tags for the Moodle export and for the QTI 2.1 export. We habe to improve and unify that in one of the next R/exams versions.

Also, another pointer, in case this is useful to anyone reading the question: Another useful strategy for asking about the interpretation of (statistical) graphics is in multiple-choice format. Let the participants judge some statements about the graphic that can either be approximately correct or clearly wrong. Of course, with open-ended question you can catch more nuances but with multiple-choice questions you can automatically assess a much larger number of participants. Or participants can self-assess in practice quizzes etc. Examples for this are the boxplots and scatterplot exercises:

• http://www.R-exams.org/templates/boxplots/
• http://www.R-exams.org/templates/scatterplot/