Quiz

I've had some experience of this using IPA and old english unicode ranges. Unfortunately the answer isn't simple because of various browser incompatabilities.

The issues I remember off the top of my head:

• Moodle (when used in english) reports its character encoding as ISO-8859-1. If you want the user to enter into text entry area any character outside that range then browser support varies widely. I believe Internet Explorer and Firefox silently convert them to the numerically encoded version e.g. θɪŋ would display fine in the edit box, and probably (see next point) display fine to viewers but would become the numerically encoded equivalent (θɪŋ) in the edit box if you re-edit and, crucially, in the answers that students submit in response to questions. So the right answer would need to be numerically encoded for Moodle to correctly match them. (Though this won't work in Safari and I think Opera browsers, as it simply replaces characters with question marks if outside the pages character set).(edit: actually testing this right now with an up-to-date Firefox browser it appears to be automatically converting ampersand encoded characters in both directions, which it didn't do before)

• Mozilla, Safari and other sensible browsers will automatically fall back to any Unicode IPA characters it has in any installed fonts if it can't find the right character in the current font. Internet Explorer seemed to need the font to be specifically set (and that exact font has to be present on the viewers machine) or it won't display correctly.

• a javascript doo-dah would probably work well, having example characters to cut and paste would work too (within the constraints mentioned above)

• Moodle is currently moving towards using Unicode for all its english pages. I'd guess that would solve most of these problems.

Hi Nikki,

I also work with phonetics. Could you give me a few more details about the type of questions you want your students to answer? Also, are these people native English speakers of EFL students.

I myself have never needed to have my EFL students use symbols in an active way, but i would be interested to discuss possible methods as I may well be doing some teacher training online next year.

You might be interested in the Flash module which can load up specially packaged unicode font files. This means that you can embed every kind of unicode font in a Flash activity and don't require your site visitors to have the font to display the font properly. See for example here :

http://jamiep.org/mod/flash/view.php?id=136&do=splash#movie

There are some documents on my site http://jamiep.org about how to set up these activities.