# Effective use of Moodle (or similar)

Currently we are using Moodle to manage our courses here. It has meant structuring the publication and turn in of homework, and has helped in distributing lecture notes and shorter documents to the students.

But Moodle has also functionality like quizzes and a question bank. What are experiences with those? How hard is it to write quizzes (particularly considering the plethora of weird notations we are so fond of)? I have quite a collection of problems (old exams, homework, filched from MSE, ...), mostly written in LaTeX. Any tools to help migrate (if it even makes sense)? How effective is the reuse of questions from one term to the other, does sharing material among colleagues work smoothly in your experience?

Looking a bit further, do you think such quizzes encourage cheating too much? It is quite simple to get somebody else to answer for me, so perhaps this should be used more for self-assessment than grading?

• I'd also be interested in experiences with Maple T.A., or is that better asked as a separate question? – J W May 23 '14 at 15:55
• @JW, it looks different enough to merit its own question. – vonbrand May 23 '14 at 16:57
• Thank you. I've now asked it: matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/2414/… – J W May 24 '14 at 5:47
• We used moodle for a long while, but we're finding that a combination of edmodo for homework, assignments and videos and google sites for reference material works better. Edmodo is great because you can type $\int_0^{\pi/3}\sin^3\theta\cos\theta d\theta$ to get $\int_0^{\pi/3}\sin^3\theta\cos\theta d\theta$, a facility I find endlessly useful for answering students questions online. The main irritations are that it doesn't keep you logged in and the mobile app used to not notify properly, but apparently it has started working now. – AndrewC May 24 '14 at 16:22