This article covers the cloze with drag and drop task type.
For a general overview of tasks and what they can do, see An introduction to tasks and for general instructions on how to add them to your course, see How to add a task to your course.
Overview of the cloze with drag and drop task
The cloze with drag and drop task asks learners to drag and drop items into blanks within text.
When should I use a cloze with drag and drop task?
This task is a variant of Cloze type response. So, the suggestions we've given in our article on cloze type response would work with this type as well. The difference is just that you give learners options to drag and drop into the blanks (rather than the blank being free form).
Cloze with drag and drop is particularly useful where the blanks are relatively similar terms (i.e. you don't want learners to be able to guess just because only a noun would fit in that spot and you've only got one noun) and free form would be too difficult or have too much variation.
Example 1 - Many grammatically correct responses
In the example below our missing terms have different meanings. But, grammatically, each of the terms would work in almost any spot. Placing them correctly requires the learner to really know what the terms mean and makes guessing much more difficult.
Example 2 - Six degrees of separation
You can also set up an easier form of "six degrees of separation" than leaving it free form. Note though that the learning from this task would be best followed up with some feedback that explains what the connections are or with a follow-up task that asks them to explain what connections they see.
Example 3 - Constructing a definition
You can also use cloze matching to set up the framework for organising the structure of a definition or process (in a similar way to how you might use the sort task, but with a horizontal display).
So, as you can see Cloze with drag and drop can be used in a range of different ways, it needn't be just filling in the missing terms from descriptive text.
How do I create a cloze with drag and drop?
All tasks load with an example task to give an idea of what each field is for. To add your own task details, you can type over the existing content in the fields or select Clear task content, to start completely fresh.
Standard fields
This task has the standard fields/options that all tasks have.
At the top:
Question - Where you set the main question/task which tells learners what to answer or do.
And at the bottom:
Hint - Add a hint to give pointers or clues to give learners extra guidance to complete the task. Learners can choose to See hint so it allows them to get this help “on demand”.
Feedback - Add feedback to give learners an automated response when they submit the task. See Writing feedback for tasks for pointers and ideas.
Feedback per response: Add specific feedback for a given response a learner could chose.
In between the top and bottom standard fields we have the following areas and fields.
Text
Under Text, add the text you want your learners to add responses to.
Add your response boxes using the Insert Response button (r) in the text formatting toolbar in the text editor. You can also use the keyboard short cut, double underscore.
Setting the correct answer
Under Correct, drag and drop the item(s) to the correct space(s).
If there are more correct answers, use the + to add alternative answers.
You can also choose to not set a correct answer. Just leave the items in the grey space, unallocated to a blank/response area. In this case, the task will not be automarked and the task will be allocated the complete/incomplete with feedback marking template to allow facilitators to manually mark the task (if desired).
Other options
Case sensitive means learners need to enter the response using the correct mix of lower and uppercase characters.
Maximum length (characters) limits learners to a maximum character count for their answer.
Shuffle options displays the response options in a different order each time the question is shown.
Duplicate responses lets learners use items more than once e.g. you can use item 1 twice to match it to response 1 and response 2.
Match all possible responses means that learners will be marked correct if their response(s) appear in any of the correct or alternative correct responses (for more detail read our article on match all possible responses).
