Text Input Problem - Current State, Gaps, and Improvements

Open edX text input problems only support the short-answer use-case. They can be case sensitive or case insensitive, and each specified answer can have individual feedback.

By default, the text input box for these problems is 20 characters wide, and this cannot be changed outside of advanced (OLX) problems. Regular expressions can be used to evaluate the input, but again, this feature only exists in the advanced editor.

Any longer text must be submitted through ORA problems, which are heavyweight and form a significant activity for both staff and learners.

There is no appropriate native tool for long-text or reflective questions, and many authors use the Free Text Response XBlock or the Problem Builder XBlock to answer this need instead.

Skilljar is often a good example of the absolute minimum that should be supported in a problem editor as their platform is not designed for robust assessment, and it still arguably has a better text input problem than Open edX, so significant work is needed to bring this problem type up to par. This is reflected in edX.org ’s problem type data, which sees text input being used by far the least of all standard CAPA problems listed in the UI (3% of all problems, almost as few as custom evaluated scripts, and almost half that of the next most popular problem, dropdown menus, which have significant issues of their own, and are in turn less than half the number of numerical input problems).

Current Gaps & Potential Improvements

• Open edX needs a tool for supporting long-text answers that is not ORA. ORA is repeatedly mentioned by users as being too heavyweight for casual use.

• Open edX needs a tool that supports ungradable reflection questions.

• All features of OLX need to be supported in the author-facing UI.

• More types of text-input are necessary than are supported by our current implementation of text input problems.

• Other platforms have a lot of options that we should learn from to expand our problems as listed in the section above.