Allow New Quizzes fill in the blanks to have multiple blanks on different lines

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

 

The old quiz system allows multiple blanks to be placed anywhere within a question; even in a table.  the new system does not.  In the old system I could pose an order of operations questions as:

 

2^2 + 4 -10/3=

[BLANK TO FILL IN]=

[BLANK TO FILL IN]=

[BLANK TO FILL IN]=

[BLANK TO FILL IN]

 

In the new system they have to be on the same line and thus create confusion.  I also cannot have them fill in missing values from a table in the new system either.  The way the old system handled multiple blanks was much more conducive to accurately measuring if students know what to do.

65 Comments
Estefania
Community Explorer

Fill in blank questions are currently only fit for one continuous line of text.

I use quizzes constantly for language learning and I sorely miss the option of using the Rich Content Editor for the Fill in blank questions, a feature which (like many others) was actually available in the Old quizzes. For instance, I want students to fill in gaps in a song, a dialogue, or a table. I now have to write the text in the RCE and provide individual gaps below, one after the other. This severely affects the readability of the questions and does not work at all if the text is longer or there are more than three or four gaps. It should still be possible to create tables or at least (!) to be able to have returns to divide parragraphs, verses, etc. and insert some basic formatting like it was before.

It would be fantastic to see the New Quizzes have at least the same features as the Old Quizzes, and not less.

 

Estefania
Community Explorer

This is a huge issue! I agree with all the comments above. We should have line breaks at a minimum, but a full Editor should not be too much to ask! It was there before... Never saw an app before that chose to remove instead of add features!

 

BethCrook
Community Contributor

We use this format heavily in many of our departments and especially in our languages departments and on our new student Placement Exams, and we cannot move to New Quizzes until we are able to recreate these work arounds.

Here is an example of one quiz section I designed in Old Quizzes for a Spanish exam. Especially in studying languages, you can imagine how important it is to have quizzes/tests in sections for testing conjugation in present tense, past tense, etc.  This is a single question with multiple fill-in-the-blanks.

Screen Shot 2021-01-07 at 3.08.12 PM.png

PLEASE make this happen... RCE is fantastic, but at an ABSOLUTE minimum, we need line breaks.

urbansk6
Community Contributor

Please give us back this ability! Our language departments really need it too—I just finished migrating about fifty Classic Quizzes and realized that the dialogues, conjugation tables, and multi-part questions I carefully formatted are now all run together and look very confusing. I'm rather overwhelmed at the thought of having to rework them all.

sylvdu63
Community Novice

Hello,

I teach french and I also want to ask you to give us back this ability! Wa are migrating a lot of Classic Quizzes and ra lot of exercises carefully formatted are now a real mess! My collegues and I are overwhelmed and sometimes we prefer rework them all. The fact that a "correpondance"-question is correct of not - without in-between, is also bad for language teachers.

rmurchshafer
Community Champion

So yeah.  I've been slowly introducing New Quizzes to select people over the last year + and this is always the biggest roadblock and why most stick with Classic Quizzes.  We gotta be able to format how the questions appear with at least line breaks, but preferably full RCE editing so you can use tables, and have some text bolded or italicized as needed.  

JPMorgan1178
Community Member

Most of my old quizzes uses fill in multiple blanks, or multiple drop downs, and now they are utterly useless if the classic quiz is going away, as my University is telling me. I really don't want to have to find a completely new way to format every single question. Please fix this.

atsuko_borgmann
Community Novice

I use this feature all the time. Please add this feature!

rlowe5
Community Member

For me, this is a must have. I have so many questions in coding classes where I present a program with blanks for my students to fill in. I have had to approximate it using the question stem with numbers in the program and then asking what goes in block 1, 2, 3, etc. Of course that does not work well because I cannot even put the blanks on separate lines!

Now that New Quizzes is here, I no longer have this essential, and frankly very basic, necessity. This is a major step backwards in functionality.

Really, we should have rich editing on all questions. Lacking that, the tests we create in the new quiz engine will always be uneven, kludgy, and amateurish.

CarlaD07
Community Explorer

Agree! Having the full rich text editor available when writing fill in the blank questions would be great. Versus having RTE only available for the question stem and not available for the statement where you can actually create blanks for students to fill in. This would make it easier for creating math equations with the editor as well. 

If you could have the rich text editor, create a table, and then highlight portions of the table to create blanks within it, that would be amazing!!