Exercise types
This page explains the different exercise types available. More exercise types will be added over time.
- What: Student selects one or multiple answer options from a list provided by the course staff.
- When to use: This exercise type is popular on MOOC courses as the assessment of submissions can be done automatically by the system. A simple way of checking whether the student has understood what was they have read.
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Tip:
- You can define whether only one or several answer options are correct.
- You can adjust grading: For example, you can give points only for submissions where the student has selected every correct answer option. Or you can reduce points for each wrong answer option selected.
- You can create questions where all answer combinations are considered correct - this allows you to create questions that the student answers based on their own experience.
- You can create success and failure message specific to each answer option. This way you can give students immediate feedback based on their answer.
- What: Similar to multiple choice, but student selects their answer through a dropdown menu.
- When to use: This exercise type is not as versatile as the other multiple-choice exercise. It can be useful in exercises where the list of answers is long and would take up a lot of space, and the answer options are short. Only allows the student to select one answer option.
- What: Students select the correct answer option to fill a blank from a dropdown menu. Each answer option can only be selected once.
- When to use: This exercise type is useful for language learning and studying terms related to a certain topic or field, for example.
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How to use: each option can include one or multiple blanks. Mark the correct answer with brackets to create a blank, for example
[ran]. Fake options are added through separate inputs.
- What: Students need to select a preset number of answer options. Students cannot submit their answer before they have selected the required number of answer options.
- When to use: This exercise type is useful in the specific case where you want the students to always select a predefined number of answer options.
- What: Student writes a text of a certain length. You can set the minimum and maximum length of the answer while creating the exercise.
- When to use: This exercise type works well for questions where students are meant to reflect or give opinions on a certain topic.
- Tip: You can make students evaluate each other's answers through the peer-review feature. For example, you can provide statements ('Was the answer well argumented') and make students select a value on a scale from 1 to 5 (Full disagree - fully agree). The feature is enabled and configured in the exercise settings when you create an exercise.
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Q: Is it possible to set up the exercise so that the student receives points as soon as they submit a solution - without the solution being reviewed by self, peers or the teacher?
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A: Yes. As long as self review or peer review is not enabled, the student receives points as soon as they have submitted a solution.
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Q: Suggested / example solutions: Is it possible to show students a suggested solution after they submit their answer?
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A: Yes. When editing a task, go to:
Advanced options->submit message-> enter text. This text is displayed to the student as soon they submit an answer. Please keep in mind that it is likely that the suggested solution might spread online, so you can for example simply create a short summary (or outline in bullet points) of what the answer should contain and how it should be formatted.
- What: Students type the correct answer option to fill a blank in the text. Answers can be checked case sensitively, or case insensitively (ignoring capitalization).
- When to use: This exercise type is useful for language learning and studying terms related to a certain topic or field, for example.
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How to use: each option can include one or multiple blanks. Mark the correct answer with brackets to create a blank, for example
[ran].
- What: Student writes an answer that is a specific, predefined string of characters. The format of the answer is validated with regex (regular expression). Student cannot submit answers that do not meet the correct format. For example, if the regex demands numeral, the student cannot submit an answer consisting of non-numeral characters.
- When to use: When you want the student to submit a short written answer. For example a single word or number.
- How-to: Python's regex tutorial
- Tip: Try out regex101 to formulate and test your regex rules.
- Q: Does this exercise type work if the lenght of the solution is multiple words?
- A: Yes. It is possible, but you need to take care to format the regex rules correctly. It is possible to set up the exercise so that students are unable to submit answers that contain too few or too many words.
- Example regex for multiple word answer:
- Format regular expression: ^[a-zA-Z0-9_]+\s+[a-zA-Z0-9_]+$
- Validity regular expression: ^(first|First)\s+second$
Q: 3. lyhytvastaus: miten toimii jos oikea vastaus on useamman sanan mittainen? A: On mahdollista, mutta täytyy pitää huolta että regex-sääntö, joka tarkistaa että hyväksytäänkö vastaus muotoillaan oikein. Voidaan esimerkiksi säätää tehtävä niin, että opiskelija ei pysty edes lähettäämään vastausta jos siinä on liian vähän tai paljon sanoja. Format regular expression: ^[a-zA-Z0-9_]+\s+[a-zA-Z0-9_]+$ Validity regular expression: ^(first|First)\s+second$
- Currently, always select Regex as grading strategy (this instruction will change once the block is updated)
- *format regular expression = Prevents student from submitting an answer that where the format is incorrect. For example, if the student is asked to submit a single character answer, the format regular expression check prevents students from submitting answers longer than one character.
- *validity regular expression = checks whether the student's submission matches the correct answer. For example, if the student is asked to submit a single character answer, and the correct answer is 'w' or 'W', the validity regular expression checks if students answer is correct and worth a point.
Example
- Exercise: in Python, which character do you have to pass as an argument to the function
openif you want to open the file for writing and want the whole file content to be overwritten. - *format regular expression =
^[a-z]{1}This rule should prevent the student from entering anything longer than 1 character and that the character should be from the Latin alphabet, not a numeral or symbol. The character should also be lower case. - *validity regular expression =
^[w]{1}This rule should check if the student's submission is the character we are looking for, in this example case 'w'
- What: Students click on words or phrases in a text to highlight them.
- When to use: This exercise type is useful for language learning and finding key information in a text, for example.
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How to use: The text can include multiple blanks. Mark the correct answer with brackets to create a blank, for example
[ran].
- What: Students select an answer on a numeric scale.
- When to use: This exercise type is useful in collecting student opinions in quantifiable format. There are no correct or incorrect answers.
- Tip: Values from 1 to 5 are commonly used in surveys. Be sure to clarify each value of the scale to students.
- What: Student can check the box next to the statement (set by the course material creators) depending on whether the statement applies to them or not. Points are awarded for both unchecked and checked submissions.
- When to use: Checkboxes are not useful for assessing learning, but are useful for asking a student to confirm that they agree to a code of conduct, for example.
- What: Student submits their answer to a question in the form a matrix: an arrangement of numbers into rows and columns.
- When to use: This exercise type is best suited for math courses dealing with matrices.
- What: Student matches each year on the timeline with an event associated with the year.
- When to use: This exercise type is helpful in visualizing and making students actively think of the order of events presented in your material.