Building a quiz page in ECB

The essential guide for checking understanding

Written by Dave Branscombe

Last published at: July 27th, 2024

A good quiz is vital to the success of your course, and what the learners learn. If you’ve produced great learning, the quiz should be easily passable, and your learners will really feel a sense of achievement. You might find this guide useful: Writing good quiz questions

Don’t waste all your time and effort of having great content, and then failing to check they’ve learnt it. Always relate the content and quiz questions back to your learning objectives.

There are two types of quiz – an untracked quiz page, which allows you to ask any number of questions at certain points throughout the course – useful to check understanding and give a ‘fist in the air’ moment to encourage the learner to continue engaging with the course. The difference with this type is that the learner can continue even if they haven’t got all the questions correct. Their score is not recorded. But it’s a useful tool for the learner as they can regularly check in with what they’ve learnt during the course so far, without having the pressure of having the quiz score count.

The quiz item is the main end of module quiz – with this one, the score is logged to the person’s learning record.

When building a quiz page, you need a Page Title and Quiz Heading for display within the live course. The quiz heading appears above the quiz introduction. We’ve named it simply Quiz Instructions, but you can change it to whatever you like.

Quiz Intro - type in your text to introduce the quiz, the learners see this before any questions appear. It’s good practice to explain that there could be single choice or multiple choice answers. We’ve given you a standard intro, but do change it as you wish.

Passmark - we’ve set at 100% for full compliance. Use the dropdown arrow to change it.

Randomise Questions - the quiz can randomise questions each time it’s taken. This is useful so that people don’t know what’s coming, and pass it only by process of elimination. If you have to have the questions asked in the order you build them, then select No.

Randomise Options - again, the quiz will randomise the answer options for each question, unless you want them to appear in a certain order, in which case select No.

Retake - this allows the learner to retake only the questions they get wrong, by selecting the Retake button, which appears after the quiz. If you want them to take the whole quiz again if they don’t pass, then select No.

Reset Module After Quiz Attempts - this is our ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ feature, which means if a learner fails the quiz more than the number of times set here, they have to complete the whole module from the start – they are reset. You can set the number of attempts up to 5, or set it to none to turn the feature off, and allow your learners unlimited attempts.

Show Question on Quiz Feedback - set this to Yes if you want the actual question to appear above the feedback for each question. You can then create your feedback knowing the learner can see the question.

Single Choice Question Asset/Multiple Choice Question Asset - there is a default asset for these, which will be picked up by each question if no specific question image is applied. You can change the defaults to your own, by uploading from your computer or selecting from the Asset Manager.

Pass Feedback - this text appears when learners pass the quiz. We’ve included some text in here for you, which you can easily change if you want to.

Fail Feedback - this text appears when learners fail the quiz. We’ve put in some standard text for you which you can change, if required. The text will need to change depending on your choices for the number of attempts, or if you’ve selected the retake option, etc.

And now to set up your questions and answer options, which is easy! For each additional question, select ‘Add Question’. Do consider the amount of time it may take a learner to complete the quiz – 10-15 questions are a suggested maximum. You can also hyperlink to documents or websites from the question/option text if required.

Enter the question into the box (don’t forget the question mark!) and format it for emphasis as you want. Sometimes you might want to hint at the number of correct answers.

Asset Type - if you want to include a question specific image (or even a video) to override the default one, you can add it here. Choose the asset type and upload it, or get it from the Asset Manager. (If it’s a video, you’ll need the Vimeo reference.)

Videos can be useful in quizzes to bring a role play element to your course. For example, asking learners to select the best response to a posed scenario.

Each question can have as many answer options as you want, just select ‘Add Option’. Remember to tick which of the answers are correct!

Correct Feedback/Incorrect Feedback – this is the individual question feedback. You could put just ‘Well done’ or ‘Bad luck’ but this isn’t that helpful for learning. With correct feedback, you want to reinforce what they’ve learnt - a great chance to give your learners a pat on the back! With incorrect answers, it’s useful to direct the learner to the place in the course where they should have seen the answer, so they can go back and look. Reinforce what the question was asking for if you haven’t set the ‘show question on feedback’ option to Yes.

The screen can get quite large if adding lots of questions, so use the collapse box buttons to close the space and avoid all that scrolling!

Remember - when you’ve completed your quiz page, select Save at the bottom of the screen.

A good follow-on guide to look at next is Previewing and checking your course in ECB

You might also find these helpful:

What is ECB and why use it?

Creating a new course in ECB

Creating modules and defining course structure in ECB

Building a text page in ECB

Building a reveal page in ECB

Building a video page in ECB