Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

The most challenging new question type that is available since today on about2findout.com is the open answer type. It just provides a textbox where you can type in the answer.

Try it here:


I did not want a stupid question type where the answer is compared to the exact string that the author provides. That leads to a lot of frustration if you don't type in exactly what the author has in mind. What if you forget a capital? What if you type in a space too much by mistake? What if there are multiple correct answers or ways to answer?

So this is how it works:

- The author types in the question and hint (optional), and indicates the expected answer. That can be free text, or one word, a number, a name (= 2 words) or a year (= 4 digits). The question taker will only be able to type in appropriate characters in the box, and see a little watermark telling what we are looking for. In my question example I'm looking for the name of a city, which is one word. So you cannot type in spaces or weird characters like @ and % in the answer box.
The default is free text without exotic characters.

- The author can also indicate if the answer should be evaluated case sensitive or not. In my example, I didn't require it, although the names of cities should be spelled with a capital. But beijing and Beijing are both fine. The default is case insensitive.

- The author can provide a list of correct answers. In my example, I accept both Beijing and Peking (the older name) as correct answers. When the answer is a name for example you could accept just the last name, the first and last name or the last and first name.

- The question taker's answer is preprocessed: trailing spaces are removed, and the spaces between words are one maximum, so extra spaces that one types in by mistake are ignored.

- Then I'm looking for the closest match with one of the correct answers. If I find a 100% match the answer is correct. If I find a match below 50% the answer is false. If the highest match is between 50% and 100% the question taker can try again, and gets a hint with the characters that were right. That way they can correct for little spelling mistakes.

I'm sure the algorithm can be improved to have a more accurate scoring, but for now it should work fine for both authors and quiz takers.

Labels: about2findout, new, open_answer