Short Answer Text Questions?

When creating an exercise, the option for INPUT SELECTION allows only for mathematical responses. Are there plans to allow for short answer text-based responses?? Is there some other way students can provide text responses to quiz questions? How are folks asking those types of questions? Thanks!

Hi @swaectech,

At the moment it is restricted to mathematical responses for a couple of reasons - firstly, the version of the exercise framework we are using (Khan Academy’s Perseus) does not natively support free text responses that are non-mathematical.

The second reason is that we have not yet implemented a user flow for ungraded responses - with the mathematical free response, we are still able to provide instant feedback to the user, but would not want to restrict other free text in this way.

We have plans to address both these issues - but they have been pushed back slightly as we have shifted priorities to address more immediate needs presented by COVID-19. I am hopeful that we can start to regain some momentum on these issues towards the end of this year.

Kind Regards,
Richard

Richard, thanks for your reply. I don’t believe that short answer responses have to be ungraded. In Google Forms, for example, teachers can supply correct answers that the system checks against for instant grading. I believe you could implement a similar solution you are using for the numerical answers (user supplies the answer). Granted, I am not versed in the backend of things to know how difficult that would be. But, I am glad to hear there are possible solutions in the pipeline.

Yes - there are definitely ways to do matching, but it can still be a little bit brittle, and our preference is to support fuller free response from the get go, as we think it is more useful for most use cases.

That makes sense. Thanks for your responses!