[New Quizzes] Show all answer combinations for Regular Expression answers (Fill in the blank)

[jbagley]

Problem statement:

Using Regular Expression in Fill in the Blank questions is relatively new and not every user knows what the Regular Expression will mean when put into a quiz (for example, for a student (who doesn't understand what Regular Expression is) viewing their answers, a designer helping on a course, or perhaps the teacher who's trying it out for the first time). Sometimes it's hard to know if you entered it right, too. I've tried some Regular Expression that didn't work and scratched my head for quite a while to figure it out. This is why it would be nice if New Quizzes showed what the accepted outcomes of a Regular Expression are.

Proposed solution:

On the short preview for a Fill in the Blank question that shows the question with its "answer", it would be very helpful to indicate that the answer is a Regular Expression (it currently looks no different than a normal "exact match" or similar setting) AND what all of the possible answers could be using the Regular Expression. For example, if I type the regular expression "(Werner (Karl )?)?Heisenberg", then this is what appears at a glance when I see the question. To someone who doesn't realize this is a Regular Expression (or even what that is), it is very confusing. So my solution would be to indicate somewhere in the preview for the question that this is a Regular Expression and also to show what the accepted answers are. In this case:

Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg

For answers that have an infinite number of possible answers, such as "lo+ng" (for "it takes a `looooooong` time for radioactive atoms to decay)", then the infinite answers can be presented inline with bolding/italics and an inductive statement like shown below.

long, loong, looong, etc.

Edit: added RTF formatting

User role(s):

admin,instructor,student,designer