StudentQuiz receives Learning Technologist Award 2020

Review questions are important for students. However, it is hard for teachers to provide all the many questions. This prompted Prof. Frank Koch to develop StudentQuiz, which enables students to create their own question pools within Moodle.

04. January 2021, Frank Koch, OST

Students configure quizzes, answer questions and improve quality by rating and commenting. StudentQuiz displays the individual progress and compares it with the peer group. The created questions become part of the Moodle question bank and can be used in standard Moodle quizzes.

StudentQuiz is an open source project using Moodle as its platform. Several student groups at the University of Applied Sciences Eastern Switzerland (OST) as well as programmers from the Moodle community contributed to this project.

Students usually take notes during classes and share these with friends, especially before exams. With StudentQuiz, they are not limited to notes but can share interactive questions to reflect what they expect in the exams. Feeding these questions into a common pool creates not just a summary of the lessons, but also provides feedback to each participant while he or she answers the questions within the pool. This approach features various advantages for learning:

Cooperation

Even if the contribution of a single student is small, a larger cohort can create an extensive question pool.

Collaboration

Questions are shared such that everybody can take advantage of each person's work. This way, students can strengthen one another. Together they can create richer learning content than what a single teacher could accomplish.

Swarm intelligence

Some questions might be wrong or need improvement. Therefore, StudentQuiz engages everyone who answers a question to also rate and comment about it.

Feedback

StudentQuiz provides the individual students with an analysis of their performance and compares this with the average performance of the group. At the level of an entire quiz, a student can e.g. compare their contribution or personal progress with the average for their group. At the level of each question, she can also see how difficult the question is for her and her peer group.

Constructivism

To answer a question is good, but to construct a question has a much better learning effect. This way, knowledge is actively created by the learner, not just passively received from the environment.

Gamification

Learning in serious games is motivating. StudentQuiz awards points for contributed questions and correct answers.

Flipped Classroom

Instructors can confirm or decline questions. In this way, knowledge is first introduced by students and then moderated by lecturers. This concept is particularly helpful in the current pandemic as it requires students to participate even from a distance.

StudentQuiz is used by about 1'000 schools worldwide. To get a better understanding of StudentQuiz you might want to watch the 15 minutes video https://tube.switch.ch/videos/d91a8a0d.

The Learning Technologist Award is presented annually by the Learning Technology Association UK to the best work in education. Further information on the award can be found at https://altc.alt.ac.uk/online2020/awards-showcase/. Further information on the StudentQuiz project at https://studentquiz.hsr.ch/.