Short answer quiz questions

Sarah Rubinfeld

I'd like to include quiz questions in my videos that require full sentence (or even multi-sentence) answers. The announcement last fall of the new fill-in-the blank question type said: "Fill in the Blanks — Added a new question type in quizzes, allowing users to add fill in the blanks or short answer questions." But when I try to add those questions to my videos, there is only space for single word answers. The students can write more words, but those words scroll off the screen so they can't see what they are writing or re-read their answer before submitting.

Is there way, either formally or as some sort of creative workaround, to allow students more space to write?

Ideally it would also be nice to make these questions manually graded - right now the system seems to require me to include a list of correct answers. I think I can work around that by not showing the 'failing' grade to the students and then assigning grades myself later, but I haven't come up with a workaround to allow longer answers, and I'm hoping someone else might have.

For context: I recently started a Panopto trial and am seriously considering purchasing a Pro account for my classes this fall. I've been impressed with the viewer structure and many of the features Panopto offers, but if it's really true that there is no way to ask short answer questions then that is probably a deal-breaker for me. I hate to walk away from what seems like a great program, but the ability to ask students to reflect on what they are watching seems sufficiently fundamental that I'm really hoping it's actually possible and I just haven't figured it out yet. I'd love to hear any suggestions from those of you with more experience. Thanks!

Caitlin McCabe

Hi Sarah,

At this time, you could have your students participate in the Discussions area for short answers; however, we don't have a short answers option for quizzes. That would be a great feature request, though - feel free to submit it here: New Feature Request.

I hope this helps, and if you have any additional questions - please feel free to ask them, as we're always happy to help!

Best wishes,

Cait

Kathryn

@Sarah Rubinfeld

One addition to the suggestion Cait made - Some users have utilized the Embed a Webpage feature as a workaround for additional types of questions. This allows you to embed a fully clickable/useable webpage that could contain additional questions. For instance, you could embed a google form.

Sarah Rubinfeld

Thanks, Cait, for responding so quickly. The Discussions feature is definitely one of the options that interests me, but it really doesn't work as a quiz alternative. As I understand it discussion contributions can be seen by all students - it's hard for me to assess their understanding of and thoughtfulness about a topic if they are nervous about 'asking silly questions' and if they can read all their classmates' responses before posting their own. And while discussions have time stamps they aren't embedded in the progress of the video, so I can't prevent them from watching the rest of the video before responding to the question, even if the rest of the video is an explanation of the answer.

I will definitely submit this as a feature request, but it sounds like it's unlikely to appear in time to be useful to me.

Kathryn, thanks so much for taking the time to share. I hadn't noticed that it was possible to embed webpages, and using google forms would definitely be an option. It's still a bit clunky as I would need to make a separate form for each question, and then sort through a whole set of google sheets for each video, but as a workaround it's definitely worth considering, and I appreciate the suggestion.

In any event, I will have to do some more thinking about my priorities, and look into some other options, but I very much appreciate both of your responses and you've given me some good things to think about.