When using Moodle cloze exercises in assignments that are generated using R's R/Exams package, what are the best approaches for dealing with issues in questions that are only identified once the question is in a live assignment?
If an issue arises with a question that's generated in Moodle (unlike R/Exams questions), normally you can just edit the question in Moodle, and then the changes will flow directly through to the question in the live assignment (for most fixes one would need to make). I don't believe we can do this with R/Exams-generated questions however, as with how the questions themselves need to be adjusted in R and then imported back into Moodle, Moodle will see any fixed version of a question as an entirely different question to the original. As such, if a student has already attempted a question with a mistake in it, getting them to be presented with the corrected question will somehow involve pointing them from the old incorrect question to the new fixed question.
It therefore doesn't seem possible for a question to be corrected and for the change to flow through to students who have already started the assignment. Am I correct in this?
The question can be fixed for students who are yet to attempt the assignment, however: You can fix the question in the back end in R, then generate corrected question instances using exams2moodle and import them into Moodle, and delete the old buggy versions. (Note that students who had already started their assignment attempt will still be pointed to the old deleted versions)
After you have imported questions created by exams2moodle() into Moodle, you can handle them just like questions created within Moodle. I wouldn't know of relevant exceptions. Thus, you should also be able to edit them within Moodle.
Of course, this is only reasonable if you have imported a small number of (or even just one) random variation(s) of a question. In contrast, if you need to edit hundreds of random variations of a shuffled exercise, then you would need to option to do an import of the Moodle XML as a new version of an existing exercise as opposed to a new exercise (default). This does not seem to be possible in a basic Moodle system but I've found this plugin in a web search: https://moodle.org/plugins/qbank_importasversion
I haven't tried this out and cannot tell you how compatible the Moodle XML generated by exams2moodle() is. But it might be worth giving it a try.