Hello, I am having a problem which seems to be new to Moodle 1.82.
About two thirds of the questions in our lessons are short answer, and now if a student leaves the answer blank, whether accidentally or on purpose; it creates a loop that doesn't allow the student to accept defeat and continue to the next question page.
Instead of telling the student that the answer was left blank, a continue button shows up on the feedback screen, and it takes the student back to the previous question page.
In Moodle 1.54 the response to an empty text box was "No answer given. Please go back and submit an answer." with a continue button, that took them back to the previous question.
Could someone please tell me how to correct this (Make 1.82 do what 1.54 did)?
Thank you for any help.
Sandra King
Hi Sandra,
Good point. I am clueless how to tell short answer what do with an "IS_NULL" value (a true blank) submitted by a student. And I was not sure where to put it in the evaluation process, either first or just before the * wild card that is always my last evaluation.
Tried several things in demo.moodle.org but beyond my skills. "", --"", --{}, and even $IS_NULL
My guess is the same as yours, the code for this kind of student answer was not included. Could be an easy tweak to a php file.
Good point. I am clueless how to tell short answer what do with an "IS_NULL" value (a true blank) submitted by a student. And I was not sure where to put it in the evaluation process, either first or just before the * wild card that is always my last evaluation.
Tried several things in demo.moodle.org but beyond my skills. "", --"", --{}, and even $IS_NULL
My guess is the same as yours, the code for this kind of student answer was not included. Could be an easy tweak to a php file.
Hi Sandra (and Chris),
Here are two answers to your problem.
1- Bug in lesson in moodle 1.8
You are right, when a student enters an empty reponse this message should be displayed "No answer given. Please go back and submit an answer." I have reported this as MDL-11636, you can vote for it if you wish.
2- How to detect an "empty response"
There is no way to detect that an empty response was submitted voluntarily or, which comes to the same, that a student wants to skip a question and still move on to the next page of the Lesson. This is quite simply because the general philosophy or the Lesson module (in moodle) is that you cannot continue to a further stage/page unless you have answered the current question... At least there is no easy/obvious way to program this. But maybe Mark will come up with a solution, if he still working on the Lesson module these days.
In the meantime, your could do the following:
- set your lesson settings to a low Maximum number of attempts (1 or 2)
- instruct your students that, if they do not know the answer to a question they should enter "*" or "dunno" or anything else, as many times as allowed maximum number of attempts.
This is not very satisfactory, but might do as a workaround.
Joseph