Ordering Problem Comparator Research
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Moodle supports ordering questions, with honestly too many different grading models to determine how many points should be awarded:
These are frankly unnecessary, and relate to extremely specific models of grading ordering activities that I do not believe to be of value to emulate. They are not explained in the documentation, and users are simply told to “choose the one that will better assess your students”, whatever that means.
When submitting, learners can receive detailed feedback on their list, which just looks confusing as it displays scores by item as a percentage:
Overall, Moodle’s implementation of this is very poor quality.
Canvas has a very simple ordering activity which isn’t particularly impressive but does the job well and keeps configuration simple - you simply type the list in order, and it is randomised for learners when the problem is loaded.
Top and bottom labels can be included to help guide the activity, such as “Oldest” or “Closest”. Notably, all Canvas question types available in New Quizzes (including this one) have been designed and tested for accessibility. So apparently Canvas' implementation of ordering problems is accessible.
Learnosity has more condensed options for grading than Moodle, which make a bit more sense, as well as multiple display options (“Button, List or Inline”). Unfortunately, what this actually means isn’t in their documentation, but this speaks to a question I have around ordering activities, which is whether there are other ways to present this activity other than a simple rectangular list, given mobile constraints.