How to Create Essay Questions in ActivePresenter 8

Essay questions give learners the freedom to voice their own opinions. In detail, learners will demonstrate their understanding of a certain topic by brainstorming ideas, organizing them in a logical way, and finally writing down their own answer in one or more sentences. 

Because of this nature, Essay questions are different from other question types like True/ False, Multiple Choice, Multiple Response, etc. A list of answer options to choose from is not available for this question type.

Using Essay questions, learners’ outcomes will not be affected by the potential ability to guess a correct answer from a list of possibilities. 

 In ActivePresenter, Essay questions consist of two main parts:

• A question or a description that asks learners what they have to do;
• A multiple-line text box which allows learners to type their answers in.

 In ActivePresenter 8, Essay is the tenth question type that you can see in the Questions tab:

 This tutorial will show you how to create an Essay question through 6 stages: 

• Insert an Essay Question
• Customize an Essay Question
• Set Correct Answers
• Set Score and Reporting
• Add Events – Actions
• Customize Feedback Layers

 Let’s start right now!

 Insert an Essay Question

 To insert an Essay question, do either of the following: 

• In the Questions tab > Essay
• In the Home tab > Interactions > Essay

 Then, you will see a new question slide inserted into your project as in the below image:

 As you can see, an Essay question slide has three parts:

• (1) the top text box to add a question or a description that asks learners what they have to do;
• (2) the answer area with a multiple-line text box where learners can type their answer in;
• (3) and the Submit button.

Customize an Essay Question

 Here are some options that you can use to customize Essay questions:

• Resize the question title (1) and the answer area (2): You can resize these sections by selecting them and dragging the resizing handles. Or, select them, then go to the Properties pane > Size & Properties tab > Transform to adjust or type the value in the Width and Height combo box:

• Format the text box: As mentioned above, the answer area of Essay question is a blank text box, therefore, you can freely format and style it in the same way you do with a normal text box. See Work with Text Entry for more details.

Set Correct Answers

 In fact, it’s really hard for learners to give the correct answer that can exactly match the predefined answer given by teachers. Therefore, the Survey mode is selected in the Score & Reporting section for Essay questions by default. In this mode, you can’t set correct answers because it is used to collect learners’ feedback or information only. 

 However, ActivePresenter still allows you to set correct answers for Essay questions if you want. To do that, at first, you need to switch to the Graded mode. To do that, in the Properties pane > Interactivity > Score & Reporting > select Graded from the Mode drop-down list (4).

Then, take a look at the General section, which is above the Score & Reporting section. Click the Add Value button (5) to display a blank box and type text into it. Do it again if you want to set more than one correct values to this question.

 To delete any correct values, simply click the Remove button (6).

Set Score and Reporting

To set score and reporting for Essay questions, select the answer area. Then, go to the Properties pane > Interactivity tab > Score & Reporting.

 This section provides a lot of useful options, including:

• Mode: Select the Graded mode if you want to measure learners’ performance, or select the Survey mode if you want to collect learners’ feedback or information; 
• Report ID: Track learners’ activities;
• Points: Set points for correct answers;
• Attempts: Set the maximum attempts that learners can interact with the question;
• Timeout: Set a time limit which only allows learners to respond to the question in the given period of time;
• Case Sensitive: Select this check box to make the uppercase and lowercase characters to be treated differently;
• Variable: Define the variable to take place. See A Complete Overview of Variables for more details.

For more details about these properties, see How to Create Interactive Quizzes. 

Add Events and Actions

 ActivePresenter offers default events and actions for Essay questions. Generally, this question type has four default events for the Graded mode (On Correct, On Incorrect, On Incomplete, and On Timeout) and three for the Survey mode (On Complete, On Incomplete, and On Timeout). 

If you’ve selected the Graded mode, here what you’ll see:

You can remove, change, or make events and actions more advanced as you wish. To do that, first, select the answer area. Then, access the Properties pane > Interactivity tab > Events – Actions.

See Work with Events – Actions to learn more.

Customize Feedback Layers

ActivePresenter automatically adds default feedback layers for Essay questions. These default feedback layers can be Correct Feedback, Incorrect Feedback, Try Again Feedback, Incomplete Feedback, and Timeout Feedback (for the Graded mode) or Complete Feedback, Incomplete Feedback, and Timeout Feedback (for the Survey mode). Bear in mind that you can delete, change, or add more if necessary. 

See Use Feedback Layers to get more details.

Now, you’ve learned how to use Essay questions in ActivePresenter 8. Download the app right now and start creating fun interactive quizzes.