Drag-and-Drop Comparator Research

Moodle has three forms of drag and drop activity in the core platform, which are all generally low quality:

• Drag and drop into text

  • This forms a cloze question where learners drag words into gaps in a sentence. 

• Drag and drop markers

  • This sets the drop zones to small target markers that learners have to drop the items onto. A penalty is applied to future points if an item is dropped incorrectly.

• Drag and drop onto image

  • This is a more typical drag and drop, where labels are dragged to drop zones that are arranged on an image. Drop zones are created by providing pixel coordinates in a box, and the quality is generally poor to the point of the documentation including comments from a user on how to use custom CSS to make drag and drop activities look less awful.

H5P’s drag and drop question is higher quality, and has a much more user-friendly authoring experience, with drop zones being defined by dragging a shape on the background image once uploaded. 

Notably, H5P’s drag and drop accessibility is limited, though not as flawed as many implementations.

QuestionMark Perception is an assessment tool used in universities that also features a featureful drag and drop question type. While their documentation appears to be private, the University of Warwick share a great deal about it, including this video on how authoring these questions works: Making a Drag and Drop Question in QMP
Key information:

• Items are called markers, and are displayed to the side of the background image. They appear to always be images:

  Open

  

• Images for markers can be uploaded directly in the tool for use, or selected from a range of defaults:

• Markers are then assigned regions, which are the drop zones, which can be rectangular, circular, or arbitrary polygons:

• Once defined, a colour is associated with each marker and each region so you can easily see which is which:

• Each answer can be given an individual score and feedback:

• While this tool is far from perfect (it does not appear accessible, and the user experience is pretty dated), the authoring experience is extremely quick and easy due to the ability to visually define drop zones, and QMP is worth comparing any potential drag-and-drop tool to.