Thank you very much to both Reviewers for their comments! Following Editor's suggestions, I provide a point-by-point responses/explanations (indicated by an '*') to Reviewer B's comments below. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Reviewer A This paper describes a tool that is likely to be useful to the academic community already using Moodle quizzes for online assessment. The description is clear and concise, and the author generously provides step-by-step instructions so that a colleague would easily be able to try this in their own teaching. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Reviewer B This is an interesting article describing a method for creating Moodle quiz questions based on data provided to students which is "up-to-date". The subject matter of mathematical e-assessment involving data is likely to be one of growing interest, as data analysis becomes an increasingly important part of HE degree programmes in a broad range of subject areas and APIs make access to 'live' data sets increasingly straightforward. The introduction describes the conflict facing teachers: that in order to be engaging, exercises should be relevant and up to date, but that regularly updating exercises with fresh data can be very time-consuming. The author offers a solution which goes some way to minimise the overhead in recycling such questions in the specific case of using Moodle's quiz activities. - Whilst I completely agree that the case for using an up-to-date context inside assessment is very compelling, I feel that the author might like to consider expanding a little on the start of the first paragraph to promote this approach further. One could argue that some data remains relevant and topical over a timescale that makes time-dependent exercises perfectly adequate: the most recent global financial crisis comes to mind within the author's field (at least in the UK where it is still talked about, a lot!) which could yield relevant questions over a timescale of a few years or more. The argument for refreshing exercises more regular than this could be expanded with some additional examples (or perhaps that there are just very few counter-examples such as the one I have given), or at least promoting the existing example to its own sentence. Personally, I would be interested, for example, to know if/how the use of recent data is reflected in the teaching of the course. * Incorporated (the role of time-scales has been mentioned and several examples/ideas regarded this added in the first paragraph). -The text in brackets in the introduction, "(no web-based interface is needed, mathematical and scientific notation can be type-set fast, .tex file can be archived, .pdf file can be previewed)" contains a surprising amount of useful information and I would consider promoting from brackets and expanding on it. Specifically, it would be useful to a reader not familiar with LaTeX (which is consistent with the way it is introduced in the paper) to point out that it is LaTeX specifically that makes the typesetting of mathematical and scientific notation easier. Presumably the .pdf is used as an alternative way of presenting the material to students? If so then I think this is worth pointing out here too: the method is offering more flexibility (I think) than if this question was simply a Moodle Quiz. * Incorporated (the information inside '()' has been expanded and the role of LaTeX emphasized, top of p.2). To clarify the role of LaTeX further, I added 'LaTeX' to the list of tools on p.2. Initially, the information was presented as a short list inside '()', because the author of the package, A.O.F. Hendrickson, describes the benefits of 'moodle' in more detail in his package manual. Regarding the .pdf, it contains the answers to the quiz questions, so in principle it could not be used in a form of a 'traditional' paper-quiz, but rather as a solution-key (on the other hand, the Moodle system provides the answers to the questions). The .pdf seems to be more suitable for the person preparing the quiz (for proof-reading). - I feel that the end of the second paragraph in the introduction, from "These tools..." to "...as the learning management system" could be dropped, as it largely repeats information contained in the preceding and subsequent paragraphs about the software used. * Incorporated (the paragraph has been deleted). - In the list of pre-requisites at the start of part 2, I think it would be worth re-wording something like "R, including the sweave package" to be clear that Sweave isn't a separate entity. I also seemed to need the fOptions package in R too, in order to run the examples. I would consider re-organising this section into pre-requisites and then the steps for compilation, as this is how a practitioner reprducing the work would follow it. * Incorporated (the sentence has been modified and the two paragraphs swapped around so that 'pre-requisites' go first). Also, in file example.Rnw I added two lines with comments for installing 'Quandl' and 'fOptions' Rpackages. These packages were also mentioned in the first paragraph of Section 2. - Worth noting that on my laptop (a mac) I had to set a symbolic link to get the Sweave.sty file to be recognised when compiling the tex file. I followed the instructions here: http://www.jason-french.com/blog/2013/08/16/easy-sweaving-for-latex-and-r/ * This information has been added before Section 4 (the reference as well) - Regarding images in the xml: it bothered me that the documentation for all parts stated that this should be possible, so I checked it out. I first added the following \includegraphics{myfile.png} with my image in the same directory, and initially found, as stated, that the image was not encoded in the xml. After a bit of digging I found that I needed the --enable-write18 flag pdflatex --enable-write18 example.tex which encoded the image, and I tested this on my Moodle sandbox and seems to work fine (note this also required ImageMagick at compilation). The documentation for the moodle package does state that this is a rather flaky process, but this would be worth reviewing and at least re-wording a little to reflect that it is possible, if difficult, to incorporate images. I did check out the verbatim issue too, and though I agree this does appear to be a limitation, html 'pre' tags can be used around the source, which works OK for the xml, as pdflatex lets the html tags through verbatim, though it does 'break' the pdf output, since they are displayed around the text. * Incorporated (I re-worded the description to say that it might be tricky). I tried running pdflatex --enable-write18 example.tex in Windows's Command Prompt, but the .xml file did not contain the image (the .pdf did). I contacted the author of moodle package via e-mail with a query about 'verbatim' environment, but received no reply :( - At the end of part 2 the author states "Such quiz could form part of formative assessment.". This could do with some expanding, as it isn't clear why the method should be limited to formative use. It isn't mentioned until later, but it could be pointed out that the opportunity to create variants of the question by following this method make it ideal for students to repeat a similar problem for formative use (or indeed to ensure academic integrity if it was summative, by giving different students different questions). Given that this would pre-empt part 3, this discussion could move to (and bulk out) the summary. * I added 'summative' as well. 'Summative' was not mentioned initially, because if 'summative' is associated with being performed under 'closed-book' environement (eg, midterm or final exam in a statistics course at a university), then the approach of this paper implicitly cannot be considered as such. This is because access to the Moodle quiz means access to a browser, and so most likely to the Internet, unless a special IT solution is used to restrict access to selected websites. On the other hand, if a quiz question involves students downloading data into R (accessed via a third party) and analyzing it, then such solution becomes cumbersome (and perhaps not every university can afford it). A discussion with variants of the same question has been moved to 'Summary' and Reviewer's comments added. - Something of an aside, but I mention a couple of similar ideas to contemplate what could be possible in the future. Some of the specialist web-based mathematical e-assessment systems are not far off having everything in place to be able to in theory follow the pipeline of pulling recent/'live' data (e.g. through a web API request), processing and presenting it to students and subsequently marking. For example Dewis can talk directly to R at runtime (see Creating statistics e-assessments using Dewis with embedded R code https://journals.gre.ac.uk/index.php/msor/article/view/422/pdf) and Numbas (https://www.numbas.org.uk/) is being used at Newcastle to assess questions on data analysis in R, based on dataframes accessed by students through R packages. It seems an entirely plausible idea of automating this further, at least in these specialist systems, such that it is entirely hands-off to the teacher. This initially sounds very appealing, though it does bring in other considerations: continuity of the third-party source of the data, and the lack of control over exactly what data the students receive. * Very interesting - thank you - I went through both platforms. In case of Dewis, I suppose one would need to check for the possible incompatibilities between how certain quantities are computed in R and SPSS. Numbas seems to be a bit Moodle-like in the sense that one needs to move between menus and boxes to edit questions, but it clearly has greater capacity. The possibility of sharing questions/exams is very useful. Interestingly, the system uses LaTeX syntax for entering answers with mathematical formulas. - Finally, as someone familiar with Moodle, but not the LaTeX package of the same name, I would suggest changing the title slightly to "moodle package", and also expanding to the more formal "mathematics and statistics", as follows: "Using LaTeX's moodle package and R's Sweave to easily create data-driven, up-to-date financial mathematics and statistics quizzes for Moodle". * Incorporated (the title has been modified accordingly)