Each month we share some of our timely frequently asked questions around educational technology.

Q: I would like to set up a quiz where my students have one hour to complete it and it is only available on one day, opening at 9am and closing at 5pm. What happens if a student doesn’t start the quiz until 4:30pm?
A: A quiz attempt in progress will automatically submit when the quiz time limit expires or the quiz close time is reached, whichever comes first.  Quizzes have a timer visible to students at the top of every quiz page. In this scenario when the student starts their quiz, the timer will show them that they only have 30 minutes despite the quiz having a one-hour time limit setting.

Note: the quiz timer is not “sticky”. If you have long questions or multiple questions on a page, as the student scrolls down the page, the timer scrolls out of view. Remind the students to look regularly (particularly for essay questions) or suggest they run their own timer.

Q: Is it possible to have questions in a quiz where students can answer with short information answers?
A: FLO has a question type called an ‘essay’ question. This question type will allow students to write a response of a file upload and/or online text. These questions must be marked manually, and the students will not get a final grade for the quiz until the teacher has marked them. When creating a new question in your question bank, simply choose ‘Essay’ from the question type menu.

To mark those answers, go to the quiz administration menu > results > manual grading. This interface will show you the questions that need to be graded manually. More information: Manually grade an essay question

For more information on different type of questions that you can use in a quiz, please visit Create a new question (from question types)

Q: I want to reuse a quiz that has already been used in my topic, but I would like to modify some of the questions. What is the best way to do this?
A: If you are planning to change some questions used in an old quiz, you should not modify them as this will impact the quiz where they were originally used. The best approach to do this is following these steps:

1. Go to the question bank and find your questions.
2. Duplicate the questions that you want to use and edit them.
3. Create a copy of your quiz and replace the original questions with the modified versions.
4. Consider if you need to reorganise your question bank (careful planning is required when using random questions).

Important note: duplicating a quiz does not duplicate the modified questions. The duplicated quiz uses the same questions as the original.

For more tips on how to organise the question bank and build and test your quiz, please visit the Quizzes in FLO – the basics (self-paced workshop).