Comparative Study of Moodle Plugins to Facilitate the Adoption of Computer-Based Assessments

Abstract

The use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) has had rapid growth over the last decades. Great efforts have been recently made to assess online students’ performance level, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty members with limited experience in the use of LMS such as Moodle, Edmodo, MOOC, Blackboard and Google Classroom face challenges creating online tests. This paper presents a descriptive and comparative study of the existing plugins used to import questions into Moodle, classifying them according to the necessary computing resources. Each of the classifications were compared and ranked, and features such as the support for gamification and the option to create parameterised questions are explored. Parameterised questions can generate a large number of different questions, which is very useful for large classes and avoids fraudulent behaviour. The paper outlines an open-source plugin developed by the authors: FastTest PlugIn, recently approved by Moodle. FastTest PlugIn is a promising alternative to mitigate the detected limitations in analysed plugins. FastTest PlugIn was validated in seminars with 230 faculty members, obtaining positive results about expectations and potential recommendations. The features of the main alternative plugins are discussed and compared, describing the potential advantages of FastTest PlugIn.