Our question customization tool allows instructors to add or remove questions throughout their lessons, as well as add new data collection tables.
Only courses that have Custom Lesson Authoring enabled are able to use this tool. If you have any questions about your course's status, contact your Account Representative.
Accessing the Question Customization tool
1. In the navigation dropdown, select "Custom Lesson Authoring."
2. In the Lesson List, select "Customize" next to the lesson you would like to modify.
The lock icon next to a lesson name means that the lesson is currently unavailable for students because there are unpublished changes. Once you have published your changes to the lesson, the icon will disappear and the lesson will be available as normal.
1. Elements on Question Customization pages
At the very top of the page is a gold ribbon to remind you that you are in Question Customization mode and therefore students are currently locked out of this lesson. Students will be able to access the lesson again once you publish your changes and exit question customization for this lesson.
Exiting with unpublished changes
If you press the X icon in the Lock-Out Banner while you have unpublished changes, you will see a warning box with three options:
- "Publish Changes" will publish the changes you have saved and unlock the lesson for students.
- "Leave without publishing" will keep the changes you have saved so far and students will remain locked out until the changes have been published.
- "Go back" will return you to the question customization experience.
Exiting before making changes
If you press the X icon in the Lock-Out Banner before making any changes, you will be presented with the following options:
- "Exit and unlock for students": This option will allow students to begin the lesson with no changes made. You will be able re-enter the question customization experience for this lesson until students have started working in it.
- Exit and leave students locked out": This option will leave the question customization experience, but students will not be able to access the lesson. This is a good option if you know you want to customize this lesson later and want to make sure no students start working on it. Just don't forget to come back and publish changes later!
When you see the Science Interactive logo and content in a gray box, that means that this content block was written by Science Interactive. This content cannot be edited. However, you can change the point value of questions and use the "Include in Lesson?" slider to hide or show these questions.
This slider appears on the top right of every question box. It indicates whether a question will be shown to students (and its grade counted) or not. If it is to the right with the teal indicator, it will appear in the lesson.
Moving the slider to the left turns off the question. If the question is turned off, its Default Point Value becomes 0 and you will a see the message "This question has been excluded from the lesson."
You can hide or show any question, whether it was written by you or Science Interactive!
This check box affects what questions are currently being displayed to you while editing. It does not have any effect on what the students see. Checking the box hides all questions in the current page that have "Include in Lesson?" turned off.
The "Save" button appears at the bottom of every page. Save your work regularly, as Cloud does not automatically save Question Customization changes.
- If the button appears teal, that means there are unsaved changes on the page.
- If they button appears gray, there are no unsaved changes on the page.
"Publish" pushes all saved work to the lesson. Students will see the new questions you've added and hidden questions will not appear.
Customizing Individual Question Sets
After familiarizing yourself with the elements and structure of this tool, you are ready to start customizing lessons! Select the lesson section below to learn how to customize the question sets inside.