Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Extension Development

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Extension Development

Overview of this book

Moodle gives you the power to create and customize feature-rich plug-ins. If you can write Moodle plug-ins, you can make it do just about anything. From making the site easier to administer, to new features, to completely changing the way it looks; plug-ins are the method Moodle offers to customize and extend its functionality. This book will show you how to build all sorts of Moodle plug-ins: admin plug-ins, Blocks, Activities, Grading components, Reports, Fliters that change the way your site works and looks. You will develop standard Moodle plug-ins such as Activities, Filters, and Blocks by creating functioning code that you can execute in your own Moodle installation. Writing modular plug-ins for Moodle will be a large focus of this book.This book will take you inside Moodle and provide you with the ability to develop code the “Moodle way”.This book will expose you to all of the core code functions in Moodle, in a progressive, understandable way. You will learn what libraries are available, what the API calls are, how it is structured and how it can be expanded beyond the plug-in system.You will begin by getting an understanding of the basic architecture that Moodle uses to operate in. Next you will build your first plug-in; a block. You will carry on building other Moodle plug-ins, gaining knowledge of the “Moodle way” of coding, before plunging deeper into the API and inner libraries. Lastly, you will learn how to integrate Moodle with other systems using a variety of methods.When you have completed, you will have a solid understanding of Moodle programming and knowledge of how to extend its functionality in whatever way you want.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Extension Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface

Question types


Question types are part of the question engine and not actually a module. However, they are a core piece of the quiz module and are designed to be used by other activity modules.

A question, in Moodle speak, is the set of definitions that make up a reusable interactive element used for assessment. These definitions include the question text, its possible answers, any grading requirements, feedback to responses, and more.

What is a question type?

A question type is a pluggable unit in the question engine that provides all of the definition and functionality of an assessment. They can be managed from the Questions menu item on the front page and any course administration menu, or from the quiz activity editing screens.

The Questions menu (shown in the following screenshot) allows you to create, edit, view, and manage questions into categories. You can also import questions to and export questions from a variety of question formats.

There are a number of standard question types...