Fill in the blank: Need room to write sentences in answer blanks

[JenniferAllen1]

As a world language teacher, I need students to be able to type sentences and SEE their entire sentence at one time. The Fill in the Blank question blank is too short. It should expand with the size of the student's answer, so that the student can see everything at once.

A similar request was made around 2017, but that thread is locked for some reason. This is a big issue for students!

[KristinL · Accepted solution]

Hi! That request is paused for comments as part of the update to the entire Ideas Process. We anticipate Ideas and comments to reopen on February 1. Idea Conversations: The Path Forward 

[SusanNiemeyer]

I teach credit ESL, and I have created a number of fill-in-the-blank quizzes.

Here are my two cents.  "Fill-in-the-blank" quizzes work for language learning work if, and only if, the students are going to write in a word or a short phrase. For these quizzes, you are going to have to enter multiple possible answers. For example:

She ........... (drink) a cup of coffee right now.

Possible answers:

is drinking

's drinking

With "classic quizzes," I still have to check each student's answers because Canvas frequently has difficulties reading apostrophes.

You are going to create a huge headache for yourself if you have your students write full sentences. Any one little deviation from the expected answer(s) will cause the students' answers to be marked as "incorrect."

Just use "essay" questions, and read and score the answers manually. 

[JenniferAllen1]

Thank you for your suggestions. 

I ask students comprehension questions, and ask them to use short answers, and work toward answering in full sentences. The full sentences are for the benefit of the students, to stretch themselves, even though they only need to have one or two specific words to earn the points. I would like for the students to see their entire sentence.

With 119 students on my rosters, I am able to grade some items as essays, but for simple comprehension questions, I am glad to be able to give them some practice that Canvas can auto grade.

In New Quizzes, there is a way to use Regular Expressions to have Canvas look for the one word they need to have to be correct. (Regular Expressions can look for a few variations as well.) I had to do a lot of searching online, but I have found it to be incredibly helpful. I will show what I have figured out below:

If the correct answer should be blue, but the capitalization does not matter, then I use:

(?i)blue

This will accept blue or Blue as correct.

If the correct answer should be Spain, and the capitalization DOES matter, then I put the following in the answer key:

Spain

If the correct answer could have multiple possibilities, then I put:

(?i)(blue|yellow|red)

This will accept blue, Blue, yellow, Yellow, red, and Red.

And finally, I had to get help from my brother who is a software engineer for this one:

If more than one word is needed, regardless of the order they are used:

^(?=.*\bred\b)(?=.*\byellow\b).*$

This will accept red and yellow, regardless of the order.