Skip to content
Marcus Green edited this page Aug 30, 2022 · 34 revisions

My Background with question development

I have been working on automatically marked web based questions  for over 20 years.(since before Moodle was released). Version 1.0 of the Gapfill question type was released in October 2012. The user documentation is here https://docs.moodle.org/en/Gapfill_question_type Each version has been updated to work with the latest version of Moodle either before the Moodle release or within weeks of the Moodle release.

My history of responding to questions and feedback can be viewed in the comments section of the Gapfill plugin (and also in the comments on the Google Adsense block going back to November 2011). Most questions have been responded to within 24 hours and frequently more quickly

The Gapfill question type is written using the standard Moodle programming interface and in the event of my being unable to continue support the program any competent programmer would be able to update to any forseeable Moodle update at a relatively minor cost.

Background to the plugin

Gapfill was developed entirely in my own time and is not dependent on any third party finance or the nature of my employment. I have been contributing to the Moodle discussion forums since spring 2003 https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=844#p5319  and have made approximatly 4,000 posts in that time, largely in the Quiz forum. Around 2010 I began to investigate ways of making the core Cloze question type easier to use. I decided it made more sense to create an entirely new question type and in May 2012 proposed a new Gapfill question type.  https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=203802. The question type has now been downloaded over 39,000 times.

My Background

I have a first degree in Social Science, a Post Graduate Diploma in IT and I am a qualified teacher with 12 years experience in the post compulsory sector. I currently work on Moodle development for a UK university.

Prior to working with Moodle I was the author and co-author of several books about the Certified Java Programmers exam and many hundreds of mock exam questions (http://www.jchq.net).  As part of this I developed three different quiz engines, one using Java Applets, one using Java Servlets and one using PHP. The first version was made publicly available in the year 2000 and received  a significant amount of traffic. My subsequent work informed my development of the Gapfill question type.