Many people have commented here at Drupal.org that they would be interested in pitching in to help fund development in some way. Many people have said things like "I have $20 for the person who...." I have long suspected that large groups of people would be able to raise significant funds through small donations and that this could have a major impact on the direction of software development.

To this end, Webs4.com is pleased to announce an experiment in module creation. They have earmarked $500 USD for the development of a quiz module[1][2] and are inviting any interested parties to follow suit and donate an amount that reflects the level of interest in seeing this module get written. The module will be released under the GPL and will be hosted here at Drupal.org as a contributed module.

The discussion on the module's architecture and features is still open, so please read the specification[1] carefully and offer your feedback, either here or on the Webs4.com site. I am also interested in hearing your feedback on the topic of using donations as a vehicle for funding open source development.

[1] http://www.webs4.com/quiz_module
[2] http://drupal.org/node/15934

cheers,

Robert Douglass
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visit me at http://www.robshouse.net

Comments

cel4145’s picture

  • The proposal currently reads, "Pick a topic. This will be a taxonomy-based category that will lead to a list of questions (categorized with term(s) from the vocabulary). Note that if the taxonomy is hierarchical, this will act like a filter, and the quiz creator will be able to work with questions drawn from broad topic (for final exams) or specific topics (for eg. chapter quizzes)." The assumption seems to be here that the teacher, if wanting questions from more than one topic area, will have setup a hierarchy since they can only pick one term. Hierarchies can be more difficult to work with conceptually, and if you want to make this easy to work with, then allowing a teacher to select multiple topics/terms from a flat list of topics will make things easier. Also, suppose that it is the second year the teacher is using the system and that they have used hierarchies in constructing the question database, but those hierarchies are no longer vailid because the course has now been rearranged. Would you prefer that the teacher have to go rearrange the hierarchy or just provide the option to individually select the appropriate topics?
  • In the quiz table, "close" has description "The date/time before which the quiz can be taken." Better to say "The date/time before which the test must be started" since the intent would be to prevent a user from starting a test, not stop them in the middle of taking it.
  • The quiz should include a time limit for the test since typically teachers might not want to let the students have an unlimited amount of time. While a student is taking a quiz, if a time limit is given, the system can include a time left message as a student progresses from question to question.
robertDouglass’s picture

1) the taxonomy system allows you to pick multiple topics so I don't see this as a problem. A flat list may work in some cases, and in those the categories can be set up appropriately. In some cases though, hierarchy is important. Take a long book, for example. A teacher may want to administer a quiz based on each chapter as reading progresses and then a quiz on the whole book after it has been read. In this case the hierarchical taxonomy would be ideal; a term for the book and a term for each chapter. I trust the taxonomy to meet all our needs here. There are, of course, useability issues with the taxonomy module in general - it is not always for lesser-talented users, but we will hopefully benefit from any general improvements to Drupal here.

Your next two points have been noted and will be added to the spec.

Thanks!

- Robert Douglass

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visit me at www.robshouse.net

cel4145’s picture

1) Okay. It was just the specification wording which implied a singular choice. I would change it to "Pick one or more topics" and revise appropriately just for clarity.

robertDouglass’s picture

- Robert Douglass

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visit me at www.robshouse.net