Cross-university question exchange platform based on Moodle LMS

Abstract

During the projects "Profilgebundene Wissens Checks 2.0" and "StudiPortal Brandenburg" funded by the European Social Fund (ESF), a Moodle-based question exchange platform (QEP) was developed and tested between 2018 and 2022. Up to eight universities in the state of Brandenburg Germany worked together in both successive projects. The work packages included the development of online subject quizzes (online self-assessments) to help prospective students match their individual level of apprehension with the knowledge required at the beginning of their studies. Depending on the obtained results, e-learning units with the necessary subject understanding were provided. An important component of the project is the question exchange platform, on which the questions from the partner universities were made available for exchange in order to serve as a basis for assessments used across the universities, primarily in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) as well as economics, law and psychology. Besides the cross-university access to the questions, the platform offers many other advantages such as extensive search options, key wording (tags), and import and export functions for the various systems of the university partners. New Moodle plugins have been developed specifically for these functionalities to extend the Moodle question bank for importing questions from other systems with metadata, searching for questions via metadata, keywords and exporting questions to other Question and Test Interoperability Specification (QTI)-based LMSs. The platform also served as a project website providing all relevant information about the project and the partner universities.