This article covers the free 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 free highlight task
The free highlight task type lets learners draw their response onto an image. This task type requires a facilitator or coach to mark it.
When should I use a free highlight task?
free highlight works well for easy-to-draw annotations (rather than full words).
Example 1: Drawing forces
Example 2: Multi-coloured mark up
You can also add multiple colours so learners can mark up different aspects.
Example 3: Draw on a quadrant
You can use Free highlight to ask learners to draw where certain things exist on a spectrum or quadrant.
Example 4: Venn diagram
You can also use Free highlight as a kind of reverse-sort, where instead of putting the items into categories (as you would in a classification task), a learner draws a Venn diagram over the top of the items to make the categories.
Remember, with image mark up activities you need to work a little harder with alt-tag descriptions for images to provide a text alternative for them, and make the image accessible for screen readers.
How do I create a free 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 add the image
Upload a picture using +Add in the image preview area. Next add in alt text and choose the line colour the learner will use to draw their answer.
If you need help choosing a line colour check out a colour tool, such as https://www.hexcolortool.com/, which will give you the correct rgb formula for the colour you want.
How to allocate a marking template
As this task is manually marked, be sure to choose a marking template to set the options facilitators have available to mark and/or add feedback.