Cloze Problem Comparator Research
- Matthew Harrington
Learnosity
In researching this, I found many tools that seemed to have extremely poor user experience for creating Cloze problems. The biggest exception to this is Learnosity, which appears to have a pretty great Cloze problem editing experience, as well as satisfying most of the user stories above.
I think the only thing I would potentially change about this is that it appears Learnosity has them as multiple different question types rather than simply being able to select an input type for each Cloze response. There are also some areas of additional flexibility that aren’t addressed, which are covered in the user stories above, but as far as the process of authoring the question itself goes, their method seems fantastic and worth emulating.
I’ve included Canvas and Moodle here, but honestly if we just replicated something similar to what Learnosity provide, we’d have one of the best experiences for Cloze question authoring on the market.
Canvas
Canvas has a Fill-in-the-Blank question type, which is essentially Cloze, and supports text entry, dropdown, and word bank (which is drag and drop from a list of words), further reinforcing these three input types as the “default” way these questions work.
Moodle
Core Moodle, as is typical of Moodle, has two different Cloze tools that do very similar things - Embedded Answers (Cloze), and their “missing words” question type, which does the same thing, just more simplistically, and is limited to dropdowns (cloze/embedded answer questions can include other inputs). Setting these up appears to be so complicated that online editors, desktop tools and excel spreadsheets have been created by their community just to simplify the syntax involved.
Moodle’s author UX appears to be a large issue when it comes to question/problem setup, even with the newer cloze editor (which significantly improves the experience).
The following input types are supported:
text entry (either case-sensitive or case insensitive)
numerical input
multiple choice, represented as a dropdown menu in-line in the text,
multiple choice, represented as a vertical column of radio buttons, or
multiple choice, represented as a horizontal row of radio-buttons,
multiple choice, represented as a vertical row of checkboxes
multiple choice, represented as a horizontal row of checkboxes
Links: