Give Yourself A Productivity GIFT: Super Easy Language To Develop Moodle Questions

The Moodle GIFT formatting language allows teachers and designers to create interactive content and assessment activities using only the default text editors and a simple set of rules based on special characters. By recognizing symbols as layout cues, GIFT shares similarities with the Markdown language. Existing questions on a Moodle course can also be exported into GIFT format for editing or importing into other sites.

Tips and notes

• Currently, the GIFT format allows for the creation of the following Moodle question-type activities: Multiple-choice, True-false, Short answer, Select missing word, and Numerical.
• You can create questions using GIFT in a regular text (TXT extension) file; just make sure you save it with UTF-8 encoding.
• Leave a blank line between questions.
• Add a title between double colon symbols: ::Question title::. If the question has no title, GIFT will recognize any immediate text as the question title.
• Specify special formatting languages between square brackets. Popular choices available include [html] and [markdown].

GIFT allows several configuration and behavior options, listed on the GIFT format Moodle documentation page here.

New GIFT developments

Don’t let the word “language” scare you! GIFT is simple and so basic you cannot go wrong. Check out this classic MoodleNews example. Since that post was written, there have been a few more developments that make it even easier to create Moodle questions using GIFT:

• A GIFT plugin became available in Moodle, which extends the language to easily add multimedia resources to questions.
• At MoodleMoot Japan 2017, a spreadsheet-based GIFT generation utility was showcased.
• Last June, Moodler Marcus shared his idea to extend GIFT to the Gapfill question type. If you like it and want this functionality to become a Moodle plugin, let him know in the Moodle forums.

Give yourself the GIFT of gapfill_quick plugin at github.com.

Here is the link for the Moodle docs: GIFT format.

This Moodle Practice related post is made possible by: eThink Education, a Certified Moodle Partner that provides a fully-managed Moodle experience including implementation, integration, cloud-hosting, and management services. To learn more about eThink, click here.