I'm a TA in a Intro to programming course. We are now up to the point where the kids are expected to be able to write some code as answers to quiz questions. However any time they enter the < symbol, Moodle assumes they want to use HTML tags.
So if they write something like "if (i < 5)", all I see as a submitted answer is "if ( i".
Is there a way to disable this?
Which question type? I assume essay.
The best thing is to just do one question per page, so you get the HTML editor, which correctly escapes <
Yes, you are correct to assume the essay question type.
Our students have reported that the HTML editor does not show up if they are using Safari. Is there another option that is not "make them use Firefox"?
Not Chrome. It uses the same inferior rendering engine as Safari.
Nothing inferior about Webkit these days. The thing that is really inferior is the HTML editor in Moodle up to 1.9. Moodle 2.0 uses TinyMCE, which works in many more browsers. Of course, there are still mobile phone broswers where that does not work.
Basically there is no good way to handle plain text with < symbols on those browsers at the moment. I feel that the essay questiontype is overdue some love. There are lots of minor features like this that would be relatively easy to do if someone just sat down for a week or two to work on it. For example, I would like to add:
Once you have done 4, so question answers can have files associated with them, then it opens the way for other cool manually graded question types, like "record some audio" or "paint a picture".
I <3 #4.
Hello to all,
for 4. wasn't this exactly the goal of the contributed fileresponse questiontype coded a few years ago during GSOC ? I have never used it and maybe it's no more working with current 1.9 Moodle version (it's surely not working with 2.0 !) ?
As I said I have never used it so maybe I didn't understood welll what fileresponse was doing.
Right, fileresponse sort-of worked in 1.9, except for some of the bits that didn't, like backing up and restoring quiz attempts. It really needs more support in the core of the question system.
Because of the file API changes in Moodle 2.0 it will be really hard to get the file response question type working there. I think it will have to wait until I get the new question engine into Moodle 2.1, then we can enhance the new question engine to handle files in quiz response data, then we can implement the file response question type properly. Except that as was discussed at the time, having it as a separate question type does not really make sense. It works better as an enhancement to the essay type.
