80 characters or less in answer box...WHY???

[jwalford]

Suddenly this week the answer box in the Quiz builder for matching questions and the answer boxes for multiple choice questions are limited to 80 characters.  Why?  It's hard or impossible to write a good description or definition in 80 characters or less in a matching question.  Is there a way to switch this back?

Jane Walford

Tekamah-Herman Schools

[awilliams]

Hey jwalford​,  here is the rational from Instructure in the Canvas Production Release Notes (2015-08-29)

Explanation: When an instructor created a matching, multiple drop-down, or multiple choice answers using the inline text field, the answers only displayed 80 characters to students. This behavior occurred because the answer field was not designed to support a long character limit for inline responses. Canvas code has been updated to limit answers to 80 characters in the inline text fields. However, for multiple choice questions, instructors can add more than 80 characters using the The Rich Content Editor, which maintains a character limit of 16384 characters.

However, since that release there has been significant dialog between Canvas users and Canvas employees. As far as I can tell based on conversation around " modifiedtitle="true" title="Recent Canvas Changes - 80 Character Limits Now?​ the current status is that this limitation has been lifted while the engineering team researches a better solution. Check out Deactivated user​ comment in the production release notes here.

[jwalford]

Thank You so much for listening to your customers so well. Lifting the 80 character limit was SUPER HELPFUL!

Canvas People Rock!

Jane

[Robbie_Grant]

jwalford,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love (especially questions that are really, really old) and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie