This article covers the text highlight 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 text highlight task
The text highlight task type lets your learners highlight words, sentences or paragraphs within a block of text.
When should I use the text highlight task?
Text highlight lends itself really well to supporting reading comprehension. But the purpose of that reading comprehension can change a fair bit. Let's take a look at a few examples.
Example 1: Spot the mis-advice
In the example below, learners are recalling what they know to spot any mistakes.
Example 2: Case study evidence
You could also step it up by using a mini case-study where you ask learners to spot what someone shouldn't do or why they did what they did. In the example below, we're asking learners to apply their knowledge of construction to find evidence for a character's decision.
Example 3: Compare and contrast
We could also get learners to compare and contrast by looking for similarities or differences as in the example below.
So the next time you've got a whole lot of text on the page, consider using text highlight to make that reading a little more active.
How do I create a text highlight task?
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.
In between the top and bottom standard fields we have the following areas and fields.
How to edit the text and choose highlight settings
Under Edit text, you can add the text that learners will be highlighting.
Under Highlight settings you will see three options: Sentence, Paragraph and Word.
When you select for example, Word, every word in the text will become a highlightable item. You can switch from one type of highlight to another using Clear.
The total number of highlighted items can be seen above the text.
How to set the correct answer(s)
Under Correct, select the correct highlighted items (in yellow as shown in image above).
If there are more correct answers, use the + to add alternative answers.
You can also choose to not set a correct answer. In which 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).