Drag-and-Drop - Current State, Gaps, and Opportunities

Open edX’s drag and drop tool is extremely accessible and reasonably user-friendly, but has an appalling authoring experience.

The first step involves defining basic settings such as the name of the activity, the weight of the problem, the instruction given to learners, and the problem “mode”. “Assessment mode” causes the activity to only provide feedback after all items are placed, while “Standard mode” causes the activity to provide feedback immediately after dropping an item.

Most strangely at this step, the author is also asked to provide all the feedback and explanatory text before they have constructed the rest of the activity.

The next step is setting up drop zones, which starts with inserting or generating a background image, which… isn’t actually defining the zones, unless the background image is generated. So the heading is somewhat inaccurate.

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Then there are some settings related to how zones display (no zones have yet been defined), such as whether to display the zone label names, display the zones on the image, or show potential zones when dragging a label.

Zones are defined using coordinates, which update on the image as they are changed, resulting in a lot of trial and error:

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Note: This image was taken from an in-depth guide to creating drag and drop activities I wrote a while ago, which isn’t on the current version of the activity, which is now somehow even worse than it used to be as the window is now wider and the background image is smaller.

Once zones are defined, the next step is to define the items to be dropped. This section opens with settings related to those items such as their colour, and how many items can go in each zone (except that’s a setting related to zones, so I personally think it should’ve been in the previous step).

The items themselves then have their own settings, such as which zone they are supposed to go in, with each item being possible to associate with multiple zones. Each item can also be an image, and has some basic display options such as a preferred pixel width for labels in order to make the activity look a bit more visually appealing.

Current Gaps & Potential Improvements

• The editing window is an extremely short postbox with plenty of width, but no height. This results in a need to scroll to even define the properties of a single label:

• At no point during the editing process can you navigate between steps. The order is always Basic Settings -> Zones -> Items. If you realise in the item step that there is an issue with your zones, you must save what you are doing, close the editing window, reopen it, go through basic settings, and then go to Zones again.

• In order to add an item, you must scroll to the bottom of the full item list, and items cannot be reordered, which is annoying due to the items being listed to learners in the order they are created and listed in the settings.

• Once created, zones cannot be reordered in the staff UI, though their order isn’t relevant, so that’s probably fine.

• Each zone is then defined, with the image being shunted over to one side of the small editing window, with the zones on the other side.

• Various settings are stored in illogical places, and there is no overall settings  tab in the same way as other components and XBlocks, which makes the authoring experience inconsistent between components.

• Overall, the editing experience needs a complete redesign as it is a torturous experience, and it’s no better in XML for power users of OLX, who also report the experience as being extremely clunky.

Additional Opportunities

There are very few truly accessible drag and drop activities in the wild. Moodle’s activities are not accessible, H5P is touted as one of the most accessible interactive activity builders on the market, and their drag and drop activity is still not screen readable.

By delivering this accessibly, our platform already has a significant accessibility edge when it comes to interactive activities. If we can just address our authoring issues, that is.

Shira Fruchtman of the educator working group mentioned that “Drag and drop problems are very restrictive in their functionality”. It is likely there are other use-cases for drag and drop that we should be enabling that we cannot currently meet, and further research with educators is recommended.