What is Question Customization?
Question customization is a new feature that allows you to do the following in lessons authored by Science Interactive:
- Add your own questions to existing question sets in any Science Interactive lesson
- Hide questions you don’t want students to answer
- Insert custom data collection in the Experimentation section. This includes photo uploads, data tables, and image labeling panels.
In order to protect the integrity of your course data and gradebook, you will be able to customize questions in any lesson up until the time when students have started that lesson.
Once any student in a specific section starts working on a lesson, that lesson will no longer be available for customization during this term. You will, however, be able to edit the lesson in next semester's section once it has been created.
Since Question Customization is managed on a lesson-by-lesson basis, any lesson that students have not yet started will remain available.
No. Once you enter question customization for a certain lesson, students will be locked out of that lesson until you have saved and published your changes. This prevents data conflicts between different versions of the same lesson.
Added Questions and Data Panels: From the student side, the questions and data collection panels you add will appear exactly like the Science Interactive-authored ones in their lesson.
Excluded Questions: Questions you exclude from a lesson will simply not appear for students, though they will remain available for you to turn on again in future semesters if you'd like. This way, you can change the questions in your lesson between semesters as needed.
Yes. All customization made to questions will be preserved in future clones of that section. This includes additional questions and data tables you have added, as well as exclusion/inclusion settings on questions.
Question Customization is only available in courses that have Custom Lesson Authoring available.
In practice, this means the tool is available in the vast majority of courses, but those customers who use StemPaq/Core kits or who elected not to turn on our premium features when adopting their course will not have access to this tool.
If you don't have access to the Custom Lesson Authoring tool, please reach out to your distance learning representative, who can help upgrade your course.
The question customization tool has launched first in a "beta" version, which primarily means it’s a brand new release and, just like with any new software, there might be unexpected bugs. We ask all of our instructors to be patient with anything unexpected that comes up while using the beta version and to let us know so we can get the issue corrected as soon as possible.
The beta version is also a slightly lighter version of the tool than the final release—some additional usability tools and features have been planned for the tool, and those will come in subsequent releases.
Of course! In fact, we encourage you to try it out and share feedback with your distance learning representative.
All of the features and changes you make in the beta version will remain available for as long as you want them and will be preserved with our final releases.
No, the order of questions cannot be changed. Make sure to add your questions in the order you would like them to appear to students.