Case-Based Questions in Moodle: One Passage, Six Questions

A lot of real assessment does not come as isolated questions. It comes in runs. Here is the patient presentation — now six questions about it. Here are the vessel's details — now work out the loading. Here is a passage, a dataset, a contract clause, a fault report. The stimulus is shared; the questions interrogate it from different angles.

Tools that only understand questions handle this badly, and the two workarounds are both bad in their own way. Section panels are the third option: a block of shared instructions that sits above the run of questions that reads from it, carries no marks, and never affects a score.

Assessment That Comes in Runs

Once you start looking, this shape is everywhere. Clinical education builds cases and asks a series of decisions about each. Aviation and maritime training give a scenario — conditions, load, position — and ask what follows. Law gives the facts, then the questions. Language and comprehension testing is a passage and a set of items. Technical training gives a fault symptom and asks for the diagnosis, the cause and the fix.

In every one of them the stimulus is not the question and should not be marked as one. It is the thing the questions are about.

Why Not Just Repeat the Passage on Every Question?

Without a way to express shared context, authors pick one of two workarounds. The first is to paste the passage into all six questions. It works, in the sense that every student can always see it — but the quiz becomes a wall of duplication, and when the case changes you now have six places to edit and five chances to miss one.

The second is to put it on the first question only. That reads cleanly right up until a student on question five needs to check a figure and has to navigate backwards through a timed assessment to find it. On a paper exam they would simply look up the page. On screen, they lose their place.

What Is a Section Panel?

A section panel is a block of instructions several questions share. It is explicitly not a question: it takes no number, carries no marks, and never affects a score. It cannot be answered, and it does not shift the numbering that students see.

It opens in full above the first question that uses it. Every later question in the same run shows a one-line control instead — select it and the panel opens where you are, so a learner on question fourteen can re-read the details without scrolling back or losing their position. Short panels are always shown in full, because collapsing two lines helps nobody.

On a printed PDF the panel is printed in full, once, above the first question of its run — so a paper copy of the assessment reads the way it does on screen.

How Do You Build One?

1. In the quiz editor, choose Section.
2. Tick the questions the panel covers, then choose Create section from ….
3. Write the panel text, and optionally a short name for the control learners will use.

The section then appears as a band above its questions, and that band is where Add questions, Edit panel and Delete section live. To take a question out of a section, use the unlink button on its row — the question stays in the quiz, it just stops reading from that panel.

Deleting behaves the way you would hope. Deleting a section removes the panel and leaves every question in place. But deleting the only question a panel covers takes the panel with it, so that confirmation names the panel it is about to remove rather than silently discarding your writing.

Why Can't a Section Skip Questions?

A section always covers questions that sit together. Add a question to a section and it moves into the section's block; remove one and it moves just past the block. This is not a limitation so much as the point — a passage cannot meaningfully apply to questions 3, 7 and 12 with unrelated items in between, and letting it try would produce assessments that read as nonsense.

The reordering arrows respect the same rule. A question outside a section steps over the whole block in one press rather than landing in the middle of someone else's case; a question inside one moves only within it.

Do Imported Quizzes Keep Their Panels?

Yes — and this is often the reason people notice the feature at all. Both Moodle and Canvas have long had a way to express this, and quizzes imported from either bring their panels across:

• Moodle calls them description items — an entry in the quiz that presents text and takes no marks.
• Canvas calls them text-only questions.
• Quizzes exported from ePro carry theirs across too.

Before section panels existed these were the parts of an imported quiz most likely to be quietly dropped — which meant a case-based exam arrived as a set of questions with the case missing, and the omission was invisible until someone read it closely. They now come through as panels.

Can One Question Sit Under Different Passages?

A panel belongs to the quiz rather than to the question bank. That is worth understanding, because it is what lets the same banked question sit under different panels in different quizzes — the same clinical reasoning item can hang off two different patient presentations without being duplicated.

It also shapes what happens when you push a bank edit out to the quizzes holding copies of a question. A quiz with no panel on that question takes the bank's, which is how existing quizzes acquire panels without editing every one by hand. A quiz that wrote its own instructions keeps them — its wording is not overwritten by a routine push. When you genuinely want the bank's wording to become the wording everywhere, the dialog says how many quizzes would be replaced and asks you to tick that explicitly.

Can I Export Case-Based Quizzes Back to Moodle?

Panels are not a one-way trip. Exporting a course as a Moodle backup (.mbz) writes each panel back out as a description item, in the slot ahead of the questions it covers, carrying no marks — so the restored quiz in Moodle reads the way it did here.

That round trip matters more than it sounds. Content you can bring in but never take out again is content you do not really own, and case-based assessments represent real authoring effort — often more than the questions themselves.

Getting Started Free

EduGears AI connects to Moodle or Canvas over LTI 1.3 — an administrator registers it once, in about three minutes, with no intrusive plugins. Section panels are part of the quiz editor, included on every plan alongside all 26 AI tools.

Frequently Asked Questions