Introducing the new Moodle question engine

The rest of the (Moodle) world is eagerly anticipating Moodle 2.0, but I would like to tell you about what I have been doing for most of the last year, but which you won't be able to have until Moodle 2.1 - unless, that is, you are a student or teacher with the Open University, in which case you will be using it from this December.

What I have done is to rewrite a large chunk of the Moodle quiz system. What chunk is that? Well, first you can split a quiz system into two main parts. There is the quiz part, which says, "This quiz comprises these questions, and will be open to students between these dates". It tracks the student and they attempt the quiz, and stores their total score. Then there is the part that deals with the details of the individual questions within each quiz.

The question part can again be split in two. There is the question bank which lets the teacher create and store questions. For example "This is a multiple choice question where the student must select one of these three options, and it is an 'Elementary maths' question." Then there is the code that controls what happens when a student attempts a question "The student sees three radio buttons and a Submit button, and when they click the button we compute a score as follows and show this feedback." That second bit is what I call the question engine, and that is what I have rewritten.

However, you cannot just change the question engine in isolation. There are knock-on effects. For example, the quiz module still maintains overall control of things, even though it delegates a lot of the details to the question engine. So there are places where the quiz says things like "Dear question engine, please display this question now", or "Dear question engine, the student submitted this data, please process it", or "Dear question engine, the teacher wants to see all students responses to all questions in this quiz, give me the data to display." All those places have to change when the question engine changes.

There were also small changes required to the question bank. mainly because the new question engine has some new features that need some extra options stored with each question. So, the question bank needs to store the new options; let teachers edit them; back them up and restore them; import them and export them; and so on.

Altogether, my year's work added about 52,000 lines of new code and removed about 25,000 lines of old code (or, if you prefer, added 27,000 lines and altered 25,000 lines). At least that is the size of the change that I committed to the OU's CVS server last Friday, just in time to make the feature-freeze for the December update of our VLE. For comparison, the whole of Moodle 2.0 is about 1,600,000 lines of code, although that includes several large third-party libraries.

I am sure that there will be some minor bugs still to be found and fixed, but this new code has already had extensive testing from my colleagues Phil Butcher and Paul Johnson, so I am confident that the remaining bug-fixes will be minor.

There is much more I want to write about the new question engine, but I think this introductory post is already long enough. Therefore, I will split the remainder of what I want to say into separate posts which I hope to publish over the next week or so.