Teacher reported three interleaved problems in the questionnaire feedback (A+ v1.8 after summer 2020 projects). These stem from the changes in checkbox questions, which show feedback right under the checkbox in v1.8.
Problem 1:
It seems like the redesigned questionnaires no longer display the
written feedback for correct answers (Only "Oikein!"). I don’t know when
this has stopped working.
(This applies to "pick-any" and "pick-one" questions both.)
For the O1/MOOC combo, this is a very big problem: we have a massive
number of important practice tasks where the students must be able to
always see the feedback after answering.
Problem 2:
In ".. pick-any::" questions, the feedback for each checkbox appears
immediately below the checkbox item. This is pedagogically awful in many
cases, since it directly tells the student the full correct answer and
may completely ruin the question. All the feedback items for a question
should appear at the end of the question, as they used to. (If some
other teacher actually wants this new behavior for some reason, I guess
there could be an option for that too.)
(Actually, after further experimentation, it seems that the behavior is
stranger than I described in the above paragraph. Some feedback items may appear right below the
checkboxes while others appear at the end — where they should be,
although not duplicated; see Problem 3 below.)
Problem 3:
This is also about the feedback for pick-any questions: In these
questions, students can (and often do) receive multiple separate items
of feedback, which were previously displayed as a bulleted list but now
appear below each checkbox. In past versions of A+, there was also a
very deliberately designed and useful feature: if a student would be
shown two feedback items, one of which is a prefix of the other, only
the longer feedback was shown. And as a special case of that rule, if
two or more feedback messages (for different checkboxes in the same
question) are identical, only one copy is shown.
This feature has been used painstakingly in O1’s materials but no longer
seems to work --- as a consequence of Problem 2, I guess. (Side note:
many feedback messages in O1 are long passages of text that are a key
part of the course’s textbook content and pedagogy. This "don’t show
prefixes" feature is crucial to make them usable.)
In combination, these bugs badly spoil hundreds of activities in
O1/MOOC. I can only hope that they are fixed in the upcoming release or
that the changes rolled back.
Teacher reported three interleaved problems in the questionnaire feedback (A+ v1.8 after summer 2020 projects). These stem from the changes in checkbox questions, which show feedback right under the checkbox in v1.8.
Problem 1:
It seems like the redesigned questionnaires no longer display the written feedback for correct answers (Only "Oikein!"). I don’t know when this has stopped working.
(This applies to "pick-any" and "pick-one" questions both.)
For the O1/MOOC combo, this is a very big problem: we have a massive number of important practice tasks where the students must be able to always see the feedback after answering.
Problem 2:
In ".. pick-any::" questions, the feedback for each checkbox appears immediately below the checkbox item. This is pedagogically awful in many cases, since it directly tells the student the full correct answer and may completely ruin the question. All the feedback items for a question should appear at the end of the question, as they used to. (If some other teacher actually wants this new behavior for some reason, I guess there could be an option for that too.)
(Actually, after further experimentation, it seems that the behavior is stranger than I described in the above paragraph. Some feedback items may appear right below the checkboxes while others appear at the end — where they should be, although not duplicated; see Problem 3 below.)
Problem 3:
This is also about the feedback for pick-any questions: In these questions, students can (and often do) receive multiple separate items of feedback, which were previously displayed as a bulleted list but now appear below each checkbox. In past versions of A+, there was also a very deliberately designed and useful feature: if a student would be shown two feedback items, one of which is a prefix of the other, only the longer feedback was shown. And as a special case of that rule, if two or more feedback messages (for different checkboxes in the same question) are identical, only one copy is shown.
This feature has been used painstakingly in O1’s materials but no longer seems to work --- as a consequence of Problem 2, I guess. (Side note: many feedback messages in O1 are long passages of text that are a key part of the course’s textbook content and pedagogy. This "don’t show prefixes" feature is crucial to make them usable.)
In combination, these bugs badly spoil hundreds of activities in O1/MOOC. I can only hope that they are fixed in the upcoming release or that the changes rolled back.