Brief Review of New 2U Problem Editor
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Recent developments with the problem editor at 2U have resulted in the introduction of a new editor for common problems. This new editor is more along the lines of other platforms, providing a better user experience for course authors at the cost of flexibility. For the sake of simplicity in this section, I’ll refer to the current problem editor as the “olive editor” and the 2U editor as the “2U editor”.
In general, the user experience of the 2U editor is better, but not especially good. It would be a mistake to simply adopt the editor as it was during testing, and believe the problem editing issue to be solved. Further iteration and extension of this new editor is required, and some fundamental design decisions that were made in constructing this new editor appear to be suboptimal. Feedback is currently being gathered, so it’s likely the next iteration of this should be much improved.
Clicking the problem button fills the screen with the 2U editor’s first step, which allows the user to pick between the 5 core input types. Notably, unlike the Olive editor, these are no longer templates, these are restricted to the specific input types. This means it is no longer possible to mix-and-match inputs within a single problem in the standard editor, and XML is required.
Clicking the advanced problem types link displays the list of advanced problem types, including those that are not supported on http://edX.org .
On selecting a simple problem, an editor opens for that specific question type.
Pros of the 2U editor
The 2U editor does the following things well over the old problem editor:
Much clearer user experience for insertion of basic problems
WYSIWYG editor for explanations and question content
Possible answers are now labelled A, B, C, etc. for easy reference
Issues with the 2U editor
As this documentation has already been shared with 2U, it’s likely at least some of the bugs and issues here have already been resolved or improved by the time you read this.
The following issues appear to be inherent to the current design and implementation of the 2U editor, rather than bugs, which I’ll capture separately below:
Major Issues
No problem flexibility - mixed question types are no longer possible without engaging with OLX
The “Question” is actually not marked as the question unless the author specifically clicks a button to mark a part of the question as the question.
Multiple parts of the text can be labelled as the question, to unknown effect.
There is no visual indication of a question being labelled for the course author, other than saying label in very faint text in the bottom left.
This UX is not only completely baffling and unclear, but also will result in numerous accessibility issues for the majority of courses.
The interface for writing hints is squashed to the side and pretty much unusable.
The box expands once enough content is put into the box to require it, but this is still extremely suboptimal for the authoring experience of these hints.
In addition, actually adding hints to these boxes will result in the sidebar being overfilled with content, affecting the usability of other controls in this area.
Text must be highlighted to bring up the WYSIWYG formatting options in answers, hints, and feedback, which means that you have to highlight existing text to insert anything like an image, symbols, or other elements in these areas, rather than simply formatting what text exists.
Despite being a WYSIWYG HTML editor, there is no option for custom HTML content, making it inflexible for power users.
It is still impossible to build cloze questions with the 2U editor, and dropdowns appear to literally be implemented as multiple choice (as they are effectively only a different, fundamentally worse way of presenting multiple choice without the cloze functionality, which is an issue the Olive editor also has that the 2U editor does not resolve).
This issue is made worse by the 2U editor due to its lack of flexibility.
The placement of different controls between the main editor and the sidebar is unintuitive, for example in Numerical input problems, the options related to answer tolerance can be found on the right, nowhere near the actual answer options.
Minor Issues
Explanation appears before the question, rather than after (which is an illogical flow, you would expect to explain the answers after entering them):
Despite having a multi-step setup process, it is not possible to go back in every step. For example, if you select a problem type, it is no longer possible to go back to the initial list of problem types. You can select another type from a list in the main 2U editor, but this means it is no longer possible to see the advanced problem templates.
When renaming the problem, the editing bar occupies the full width of the screen, which leads to the save and close buttons all being over the other side of the screen next to the button to close the entire problem editor:
Accidentally clicking the wrong X will prompt you asking whether you want to close the entire question, thankfully, and somewhat weirdly, save the edits made to the problem title.
The user experience of the options in the right-hand menu is a little clunky and sometimes unclear:
For example to change how many points a problem is worth, you must first expand the box by clicking the heading, and then edit the value:
In addition to this, changing the number of attempts requires you to click “Scoring”, then untick Unlimited attempts, and then type a value.
The default value in the box for attempts when unavailable is for some reason “Attempts”.
Fundamentally important options are hidden under “advanced settings”, such as when the learner can view the problem answer. This is likely due to being able to configure these options at a course-level, but this is still not a great experience.
Adding feedback tied to specific options requires selection of an icon next to the answer that is not immediately clear in its purpose:
There is no confirmation before an answer is deleted, and the delete option is the trash can icon immediately next to the feedback icon. This can and will lead to tragedy
Bugs encountered with 2U editor
The following bugs were encountered during testing this feature on edX.org :
The “Hints” right-hand menu option cannot be expanded or collapsed, unlike all the other boxes, despite being interactable and a valid focus target.
When highlighting text, it is possible to click on a part of the WYSIWYG formatting options and appear to deselect the text. Any additional formatting options selected re-highlights the affected text, it’s just a strange experience:
In any box where formatting options can be used, the WYSIWYG formatting options appear when the input area is clicked until you start typing. This looks extremely strange in both answer options and the tiny hint area:
I have been unable to actually replicate this, but I was somehow able to delete the letter A when editing an answer option (I have no idea how this happened):
The interface for creating text and numerical input problems is not at all tailored to these problem types, and it is generally not visually clear or distinctive to the author what kind of problem is being configured.
Converting to the OLX editor