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Activity Archiving Driver: Quiz

This activity archiving driver exports quiz attempts as PDF and HTML files together with all file attachments uploaded by students. Attempt PDFs will be created in a PDF/A-3b compliant format, ideal for long-term storage. A checksum is calculated for every file within the archive, to allow verification of file integrity whenever needed. Created archives can also be cryptographically signed by a trusted authority using the Time-Stamp Protocol (TSP).

Comprehensive archive settings allow selecting what should be included in the generated reports on a fine-granular level (e.g., exclude example solutions, include answer history, ...). Generated quiz attempt reports include all elements of the test, even complex ones like MathJax formulas, STACK plots, GeoGebra applets, and other question / content types that require JavaScript processing. All PDF and HTML files are fully text-searchable, including rendered MathJax formulas. Content is saved vector based, whenever possible, to allow high-quality printing and zooming while keeping the file size down.

Quiz archives are created by an external Moodle Archiving Worker service to remove load from Moodle and to eliminate the need to install a large number of software dependencies on the webserver. It can easily be deployed using Docker.

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Features

  • Archiving of quiz attempts as PDF/A-3b and HTML files
  • Support for file submissions / attachments (e.g., essay files)
  • Quiz attempt reports are accessible completely independent of Moodle, hereby ensuring long-term readability
  • Customization of generated PDF and HTML reports
    • Allows creation of reduced reports, e.g., without example solutions, for handing out to students during inspection
  • Support for complex content and question types, including Drag and Drop, MathJax formulas, STACK plots, and other question / content types that require JavaScript processing
  • Support for question type JACK
  • Quiz attempt reports are fully text-searchable, including mathematical formulas
  • Generation of checksums for every file within the archive and the archive itself
  • Cryptographic signing of archives and their creation date using the Time-Stamp Protocol (TSP)
  • Attempt report folder and file names are fully customizable and support dynamic variables (e.g., course name, quiz name, username, ...)
  • Allows definition of global archiving defaults as well as forced archiving policies (i.e., locked archive job presets that cannot be changed by the user)
  • Fully asynchronous archive creation to reduce load on Moodle Server
  • Data compression and vector based MathJax formulas to preserve disk space
  • Technical separation of Moodle and archive worker service
  • Data-minimizing and security driven design

Requirements

In order to use the quiz archiving sub-plugin, you need to have the following prerequisites met:

  • Moodle 4.5 (LTS) or newer
  • PHP 8.1 or newer
  • PostgreSQL or MariaDB / MySQL
  • Admin access to the Moodle instance and shell access to the server (e.g., SSH)
  • At least 1 CPU core and 1 GB of RAM available for the archive worker service

This plugin requires a separate worker service

Quiz archives are created by an external archive worker service. It uses the Moodle webservice API to query the required data and to upload the created archive.