Have you got some "offline" activities as part of your course that you want to be able to easily keep track of? Or maybe you want a way for your learners and you to be able to track progress towards a project?

Multiple choice tasks can be used as a sort of “checklist” to quickly get an idea of where learners are at. In this article, you’ll see a few examples of how you can “bend” multiple choice and choice matrix tasks to be a little more open - whether as checklists, “poll” or self assessment rubric.

Using the tasks in this way means you do have to carefully consider how or if you set the “correct answers” so be sure to read the Setting the correct answer section below.

In this example we use a multiple-choice to function as a single checklist of things learners need to complete offline.

Note: If learners complete the items at different times, they will need to resubmit the "checklist" each time to save their progress.

Having the list all in the one task keeps the task list for learners short and it's a little easier-on-the-eye in the page itself.

However, in the note above, you'll see it has a slight downside if you're expecting learners to need to complete this checklist over multiple sittings. If that's the case, you might choose to break up the checklist as below.
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Having the items as separate tasks can give the facilitator a little more easy-to-access visibility over exactly which parts of a list have been completed. So this approach might suit checklist tasks that will be completed over a longer period of time or are more complex.

If you think learners' motivation might be increased if they get to tick off sub-items, you list the sub-tasks as a checklist. This approach might also help if you think learners might need more direction to not miss a step etc.

In the example below, there is no real "correct" answer. Learners could pick any (and any number of) the options in the task.

You could also use a choice matrix task that is completely open ended which gives learners the option to say how much experience they have of certain things on a scale e.g. Aware but no experience, Minimal experience, Some experience, A lot of experience.

In the example below we use a choice matrix task set up as a rubric to allow learners to self-assess.

You could also do this as a single-point rubric.

When you're using a multiple choice task as a checklist or open-ended task, you need to think about how you want learners and facilitators to see how responses are "marked".

Automarked tasks only show up as a green tick in the facilitator's Class Console if learners select all the correct answers in a multiple-select scenario. That is, if A and B are selected as the correct answers, learners have to select A and B to be marked "correct".

But (to our advantage in this particular case) when being automarked, learners are only shown how they were marked i.e. whether the item they ticked was one of the correct items. So they oughtn't see the answer they gave as being "wrong".

With all this in mind, you have a few options for how you choose to set up the correct answer.

For a checklist that is a "you-must complete" type checklist, you can simply tick the items you would expect learners to tick to complete (i.e. all of them).

Or if learners might answer slightly differently and their answers still be treated as correct, use the option to add alternative answers.

Finally, if it's not possible to set all the many combinations of alternate answers, you can not select any of the answers. This means the task cannot be automarked and can be marked by a facilitator (if desired).

Learners don't see any ticks or crosses on their responses and the task shows as Done.

Facilitators see the task as Awaiting feedback in their Class console and can mark and/or add feedback.