Annotation Problems

Owned by Matthew Harrington
Nov 27, 2023
1 min read

Annotation problems provide staff with a way of tying a question to a section of text within a larger passage. It is useful for academic subjects with subject matter to analyse, such as literature or law.

The screenshot below shows the implementation of this problem as it exists in the Open edX documentation:

This problem has the following elements:

  • Instructions - Telling the learner what task to perform

  • Text - The wider passage of text in which the relevant line(s) is/are highlighted

  • Annotations - The highlighted text within the passage

  • Questions - Questions that are asked of the learner related to each highlighted passage

  • Explanation - Text that appears after the question is answered

At its core, the Annotation Problem is a text analysis problem. The core purpose being to display some text, and ask questions about the contents of that text. Whether it is displayed by an annotation or not is essentially a UX choice.

This feature is not a standard problem type, and is not a core problem type supported by other LMSes.