How to use Moodle for paper and pencil – offline quiz? #Moodletips

Moodle Quiz engine is one of the best among the all available learning management systems. You can customize Moodle quizzes to meet all sector specific requirements from small individual students to large universities, from STEM to language and music teaching etc. But have you ever need to use Moodle for offline quizzes?
For example, let’s assume that you want to assess large number of students on same time. Creating hardware infrastructure for such an exam can be costlier affair. What if you can take the exam offline like on paper & pencil and then grade them in Moodle? Like this you can assess a large number of students in a short span of time.
To support offline quiz, there is a Moodle plugin – “Offline Quiz“. The Offline quiz Moodle plugin adds paper-and-pencil multiple-choice quizzes to Moodle. The offline quiz plugin is developed by Academic Moodle Cooperation and is compatible with all stable Moodle versions till Moodle 3.2.

How it works?

Offline quiz plugin is easy to use. The steps in making an offline quiz involves:

1. Teacher creates a new offline quiz activity in Moodle course and adds multiple choice questions all-or-nothing multiple-choice questions or description questions (text).
2. The teacher then adds the questions from question bank and creates question sheets and answer forms as PDF (DOCX) documents.
3. The question sheets and answer forms are handed out to students for the real quiz.
4. The students mark the answers they think are correct in the answer form.
5. Teacher then scans all the filled-in answer forms and the scanned answer forms images are evaluated and graded automatically within the module.
6. After results have been created in an offline quiz, students can review their result as usual.

As a teacher you can allow the students to see the scanned answer forms and which markings have been recognized as incorrect. You can also print the list of participants from Moodle for easy marking.
If the steps are not clear, then you can follow this awesome cheat sheet for using the Offline Quiz Moodle plugin. You can download the Offline Quiz plugin from the Moodle plugins directory here.
The plugin is awarded with the Reviewer’s Choice award which are given by the plugins guardians and reviewers for particularly useful, well coded or otherwise interesting plugins.
Do you ever need to use Moodle for offline quizzes? Is there any other way to use Moodle for offline assessment? Do let us know in the comments section below.