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Activity Item Types

An overview of the types of activity items

Seth Killian avatar
Written by Seth Killian
Updated over 4 months ago

When building an activity, you can add content and prompts. Content is what you provide to the learner and prompts are how they respond.

Content

Text Content

Text Content is used to provide blocks of rich text. With the editing toolbar, you can insert lists, tables, links, images, files, and other media content. When inserting media, you can click on the embed tab and paste in embed links from other sites.

You can also quickly access most features of the editing toolbar by pressing / then typing what you're looking for. This shortcut also works on any text field that has an editing toolbar!

Audio

Audio content is used to provide audio files to your students. You can click the microphone icon to record an audio file or click "upload" to insert an existing audio file.

Video

Video Content can be used to record your own video, upload a video, or embed one from YouTube. After pasting a link, you'll see a preview of the video. For more information on using video content, click here.

Prompts

Prompts are used for student responses. Each prompt has a number of points associated with it and a text field where you can optionally enter instructions.

Text Prompt

Text prompts are for open ended responses. From the prompt options, you can set a larger text box by changing the length from short to long. We recommend using a short response for a few sentences or less and a long response for one or more paragraphs. Text prompts are manually graded and do not allow for any formatting in the students' responses.

Multiple Choice

Multiple choice prompts offer multiple options and require students to select the correct answer or correct combination of answers. Multiple choice prompts offer a variety of features you can use to customize them. To learn more, click here.

Ordering

Like the name suggests, ordering prompts have students place scrambled options in the correct order. You can click + Add Option to add more options to the list. If you need to change the order, you can click and drag options to the correct position.

Grouping

Grouping prompts require students to place a list of scrambled answer choices in the correct category to receive credit. By default there will be two groups, but you can click + Add Group at the bottom to add more. You can click the title of the group in bold to rename it. To add more items to a group, click + Add Item.

Fill Blanks

Fill Blank prompts require students to fill in one or more missing words in an incomplete sentence. After entering text, you can either highlight a word or passage and click Mark as Blank to create a blank. Fill in the Blank questions can be automatically or manually graded. To allow for multiple correct answers or other advanced features, check out our Fill in the Blank Prompts article.

Mark Tokens

Mark tokens prompts require students to select all of the correct words in order to receive credit. Partial credit is currently not supported for this prompt. After adding text, you can turn it into tokens by clicking Edit Tokens. After the tokens are created, you can set which ones are correct by clicking Edit Answers.

Image Labeling

On image labeling prompts, you can upload your own image and create labels that students will need to correctly fill in for credit. Simply double-click anywhere on the image to create a label. You can drag and drop labels to rearrange or delete them.

Audio Recording

Recording prompts are similar to Recording content items, the only difference is that the students record themselves. Recording prompts are best used for open ended questions and require manual grading. If you click the prompt options icon , there are some options you can change:

  • Allow Uploading: Students can upload audio files from their computer.

  • Limit Attempts: Limit how many attempts students have to record themselves.

  • Limit Duration: Limit how long the recording can be.

Video Recording

The video recording prompt allows students to record a video with the camera on their device. Like audio recordings, they must be manually graded.

Spoken Responses

Spoken Response prompts allow you to ask students questions that should be responded to using their voice. You can add a list of acceptable responses. For a response with variables such as a student's name or age, you can add a wildcard using an asterisk followed by the name of the variable. For example, you could ask the student "How old are you?" and the accepted response "I am *age years old" would allow "I am eighteen years old" or "I am twenty-one years old" since it ignores the word between "years" and "old". Spoken Responses are automatically graded using voice recognition.

Since there are sometimes issues with beginning learners and voice recognition built for native speakers, we give you the option to save a recording. On the submissions page, you will be able to see the student's most recent recording and the number of total attempts.

NOTE: The speech engine used is currently only supported in Google Chrome. As a best practice, accepted responses should not be more than a few words to ensure auto-grading accuracy. For open ended answers meant to be manually graded, we recommend the Recording prompt.

Discussion Board

The discussion board prompt can be used to post a discussion topic for students to respond to. Students can type a response, record a video response, and upload images or other files with their responses.

File Upload

File upload prompts allow students to upload work that was not completed or created on Lingco Classroom.  File uploads allow the instructor to incorporate the work with the assignment overall and assign points for the work. Students can upload standard office document types, and images. File upload prompts are only manually graded.


We're often adding new activity item types based on user feedback. If there's something that you would like to see added to activities, let us know!

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