Multiple choice questions in Peerwise

Yesterday morning I particated in a wonderful webinar on Peerwise (http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/), led by Paul Denny from the University of Auckland. The more I see of it, the more I am impressed by Peerwise – yesterday I attempted to write questions for myself for the first time, and also reviewed other people’s questions. It was tremendous fun and we all agreed that students would be likely to learn by authoring questions and attempting and reviewing other students’ questions.

Someone asked Paul if has plans to add question types other than multiple choice (the answer is yes, but not many). However this led to an interesting point – Paul explained that for student authoring of questions, multiple choice is good, because they have to think about the distractors. He could be right!