Writing the Question Templates

The question templates are the .Rmd files. Find how-to’s in the files returned by example_paths(). Best starting point is example_paths()["mixture"], that contains solutions to most features you might need in an exam question.

The recommended way of debugging the questions is via

filename <- "potential-exercise.Rmd"
exams::exams2html(filename, n = 1L,
                  converter = "pandoc-mathjax",
                  verbose = TRUE)

The generated HTML file opened in the browser closely resembles the looks of the exercise on MyLearn.

Generating the Exercises

Set the current working directory to where the exercise templates are, then run the following.

filenames <- list.files(pattern = ".*.Rmd$")
n <- 25L
for (filename in filenames) {
  exams2mylearn(filename, n = n,
                outfile = "exam-exercises.zip",
                dir = ".", dontask = TRUE)
}

filenames <- list.files(pattern = ".*.Rmd$")
n <- 500L
for (filename in filenames) {
  exams2mylearn(filename, n = n,
                outfile = "exam-exercises.zip",
                dir = ".", dontask = TRUE,
                distort.shortname = TRUE,
                verbose = TRUE)
}

Uploading to MyLearn

In the course find Administrate, then under “Old” learning materials click on organize. Then under XML-file choose the .zip file created in the previous step. Finally, click on Import learning materials.

Importing Exercises

Yes, uploading and importing are different steps. In the menu of the course’s Learning activities, click on Import > Import of existing learning materials. A table of uploaded exercises appears.

Use the filters to filter out your exercises. The most useful filters are Already imported set to No and the text input where you can use the unique shortnames.

Select all exercises with one click, then Selected items > Import. This brings you to the imported exercises. Select all and then Selected items > Add to clipboard.

Organizing a Random Question on MyLearn

Create a new Poolfolder in the Learning activities and open it. Click on Clipboard > Insert content here and then ok. Release all questions in the poolfolder otherwise the random question won’t work.

Now create a Proxy outside of the poolfolder and associate it with the poolfolder you created. This was the last step, congratulations!

The poolfolder contains the pool of questions that the random question will choose from. It samples with replacement from the pool each time someone opens the question. Poolfolders and their content are always hidden from students.

At this point I recommend that you delete the exercises in the imported view. For that: in the menu of the course’s Learning activities, click on Import > Import of existing learning materials. Delete all exercises.