Coursera - Multiple Choice
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Coursera, similarly to Moodle, offers two types of “multiple choice questions” that map to checkboxes or radio buttons (what Open edX has typically referred to as multiple choice questions in the past).
While authoring options are unknown, spot-checking Coursera courses shows not a great deal of flexibility or functionality being used. If greater functionality than simply providing learners with options with radio buttons exists, it is not widely used. Links and images can be included, as can basic formatting such as bold text.
Coursera quizzes appear to have no facility to offer non-problem content, leading to some… creative workarounds by course authors:
Interestingly, once a quiz is submitted, Coursera questions do not display the answer you selected. This may be intended as an anti-cheating measure, but is a strange user experience:
The one innovative use of multiple-choice questions I am able to find mention of is noteworthy simply because the radio buttons appear in the middle of a video, for in-video questions. But these questions cannot be graded, and are always completely optional, as all grading has to take place in a quiz.
Overall, Coursera’s basic quiz features seem extremely poor, and set a low bar to surpass for the MOOC use-case.