Gamify Online Lessons with Realtime Quizzes
If you have been an online instructor over the past year or more, you should be open to any online activities that breaks up the synchronous class routine. Kahoot, Quizlet Live and Quizizz are a few games that learners can use to check comprehension and compete with their classmates. If your LMS is Moodle, you can also combine the plugin Realtime Quiz to your online class offerings.
The Realtime Quiz activity allows students to participate in timed online quizzes with their classmates, no matter their location. The challenge of a countdown timer and competing with their peers demands focus on course content. Since these quizzes are synchronous, students must be logged in at a defined time to participate. Realtime Quiz sessions can be a fun way to engage learners with the course content in a gamified activity while they are reviewing material.
Opportunities to interact with the teacher, each other, and the material in a fun and engaging ways include materials reviews, low-stakes formative assessments, discussion starters, or even real time polls. Teachers can create questions that include text, audio, video, hyperlinks, and images to enrich the context and skills required for success. As the instructor makes the quiz, questions can be recycled the course question bank or vice versa. Teachers can also review the results of each session to identify areas of concern or learner strengths.
Setting up a Realtime Quiz
Creating a Realtime Quiz activity is simple if the questions are already available on a word processor document. After naming the Realtime Quiz, the teacher sets a default question time. The default is 30 seconds. For more challenging questions, the default time can be overridden. After this the instructor adds questions and indicates the correct answers by completing a basic form. There is an option of No ‘right’ answer for class polls. The Realtime Quiz is saved and positioned in the Moodle course, waiting for students. Teachers can preview the quiz to check for issues such as typos.
Playing Online
- Each student confirms that they have the quiz opened.
- Students click on the Join quiz button.
- The teacher clicks on the start Quiz button, and then on the Next button.
- Student receives each question at the same time with a time limit.
- The correct answer is displayed after each question time expires. The number of students giving each answer and some statistics related to the question result are displayed as well. At this point the teach can review and discuss each question before continuing.
- At the end of the activity, results are displayed and the teacher direct learners to the next learning event of the class.
After a Realtime Quiz
After the synchronous session, teachers can review the answers, to identify any areas that may need to be reinforced in a future lesson or dare I say it – homework! Teachers can identify a Realtime Quiz session by the game code to review single sessions and individual student performance or all of the attempts to determine trends with the quiz content. Editing quizzes is easy with the
Final thoughts
Since the Realtime quiz is a Moodle plugin, there are no associated membership issues for students or instructors. This is a suitable activity for synchronous online classes. If it is not in your Moodle activities menu, ask your administrator to add it to your Moodle offerings.
Resources
Realtime Quiz, https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_realtimequiz
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Great post John !
Not everyone has the ability to install plugins, but a relatively simple plugin like this shows how some new functionality can be really beneficial 🙂