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The label with drag and drop task
The label with drag and drop task

Authors can create label with drag and drop tasks that let learners drag and drop items from a list onto an image.

Caitlin Foran avatar
Written by Caitlin Foran
Updated over a week ago

This article covers the label 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 label with drag and drop task

In the label with drag and drop task learners can drag and drop items from a list of potential answers to the correct response box on the image. There is the option of allowing more than one correct response per container.

When should I use a label with drag and drop task?

The label with drag and drop task is useful for labelling images where the options for dragging and dropping are somewhat similar or for when you might want a particular area of an image to have more than one label. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Example 1: Labelling a black hole

In this example learners are labelling a diagram of a black hole.

Image of a black hole with 6 labels on top of it, and 3 of the labels filled in.

Example 2: Venn diagram

In this next example we can see that learners can drop more than one response into the one container.

Image of a Venn diagram for Galileo Galilei and Sir Isaac Newton with 3 containers for dropping responses into.

Example 3: Nine diamond ranking

In the nine diamond ranking example below we choose not to set correct answers to leave the task open for learners.

Image of a Nine diamond ranking exercise showing response containers for Most important, Very important, Important, Less important and Least important.

Looking at the two last examples, we can see that you don’t need to have a topic/context with “parts of things” to label e.g. anatomy or astronomy. Instead, you can get creative and use any kind of diagram that helps learners to visualise or compare concepts.

How do I create a Label with drag and drop 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.

Clear task content button on right of task element below task type choice.

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 set the image

Add an image using the +Add (or Edit) button under Image preview.

Screenshot showing how authors can add an image to task using the add button under Image Preview

Then complete the related fields:

  • Image Alternative Text: Appears if the image cannot be displayed on a page.

  • Text on hover: Appears when the mouse hovers over the image.

  • Width (px): Specifies the width (px) for the image (leaving this blank allows the image to scale).

How to set the response containers

You can now add response containers to your image. Three appear by default.

To add a new response container, select the Draw and resize option to the left of the toolbar. Then click and drag the response container to the desired size.

Add pointers by selecting a response container and choosing one of the four options under Pointers in the toolbar.

To delete a response container, select the response container and select Delete on the toolbar.

How to set the items to be dragged and dropped

In the Possible Responses section, enter all responses that the learner can choose from.

Use +Add to create a new response, and the trash icon to remove a response.

How to set the correct answers

Under Correct, drag and drop your items to the correct places to allow the task to be automarked.

If there are more correct answers, use the + to add alternative answers.

As seen in the examples, you can also choose to not set a correct answer. If you don’t want the question to be automarked, leave the items in the grey space, unallocated to a response container. 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

You can also specify additional options:

  • Enable Duplicate responses: Allows response to be reused and means a response when dragged into a box will not disappear from the possible responses container.

  • Show Drag Handles: Allows you to show or hide the responses drag handles.

  • Shuffle possible responses: Displays the possible response drag and drop options in a different order each time the task is loaded.

  • Transparent possible responses: Makes responses transparent after being dragged into a response container.

  • Fill colour: Lets you set the colour and opacity for the background of all response containers.

  • Maximum responses per container: Defines how many responses can be dropped per container.

  • Show dashed border: Determines whether or not borders are visible in response containers.

  • Response container position: Defines the position of the possible responses container. The container can be positioned on the top, bottom, left or right of the question.

  • Response container width: When the Response container is placed on the left or right position, you can alter the proportion of the full width that the response container takes up. i.e. if you put 25, then the response container is 25% of the width, and the image is 75% of the width. Note: The min/max numbers that change the width of the response container vary depending on your image size, for some you can go up to 90. For most purposes, we recommend a number between 20 and 60.

  • Font size controls the size of the font for items in this task - Small(11px), Normal (14px), Large (17px), Extra large (20px), and Huge (24px). We recommend Large for most purposes.

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