Mashing in moodle - or a quiz chain

In moodle you can upload a single hot potato file as an activity. You should also be able to upload multiple hot potato files and create a quiz chain whereby students are led from one to the next in an order specified by the course creator. I know this is possible because I have done it using instructions from the moodle forum here.

As you can see the  End of unit quiz has been listed here in 4 sections but the little closed eye shows that students would only see quiz 1. I am in the process of trying to create the same kind of chain again with different files for the next unit and, although I am 99% certain I am doing exactly the same as before, I cannot get it to work.







Today, when I follow the instructions from the forum above I got the first file in the chain but not the others. After a considerable amount of messing around I have discovered a few things. The most important of which is that if start the chain with the second file it works fine so the problem must be in the link between exercise 1 and exercise 2.

The problem was indeed the link between exercises 1 and 2, the important thing here, it seems, is making sure you have all of the links set up correctly. In your quiz file under: options - configure output - buttons. You need to set the next exercise URL using the .htm files you created when you used the masher. This seems to have solved my problem anyway.

This is also the solution to the problem I had with my 1st quiz chain which was the error message "sorry the requested file could not be found" after the last quiz in the chain. If you set the next exercise URL to be index.htm you will send your students to the contents page created when you built the masher unit in hot potatoes. The best thing about this is that I was able to make a simple edit of that page so it looked something like this.

Including the hyperlink which takes you back to the moodle course also solves the problem that I could find no obvious way of making the quizzes open in a new window.

I will follow this post with step by step instructions for creating a quiz chain.