2,500,000 Attempts

I am upgrading the schools Moodle server this week. We were using Moodle before Moodle was cool. The very first course ever created in our Moodle was Peterson Independent Research in Physics.

I love Moodle. It is the perfect mix of teacher and school terms, ease of use and student flexibility. It is the glue that holds together our one-to-one MacBook program. Teachers feel comfortable moving their lessons into Moodle. They get it right away. They have this blank nice looking page, and they add familiar items like assignments and resources and quizzes.

At my first ever whole faculty training on using the Moodle quiz module I spent the first hour trying to move the teachers off from the idea that you had to use it for quizzes. I had them brainstorm other uses for it. I showed them ideas I had been using in my classroom with pre-assessment and formative assessment.

Wednesday I am pulling the plug on Moodle 1.9.9 and moving to Moodle 2.1. This is not an upgrade for the feint of heart. As part of this upgrade there is huge change in the way the quiz engine works, and I was presented along the way with a statistic. In all the years we have had Moodle it has stored every quiz attempt ever taken. This sits in our database, and the total attempts at quizzes are 2,500,000.

Our school mission is, "Equipping minds and nurturing hearts to transform the world for Jesus Christ." My question: would we have advanced our mission more by giving 2.5 million quizzes, or if we had instead applied our learning to make 2.5 million edits to the Wikipedia?