Line breaks in responses
I really like Poll Everywhere, but a serious short-coming for me is the lack of a very basic function.
I would like to be able to use Poll Everywhere to get students to practice their essay writing skills. My plan is to have students write or plan essay sections in groups in class time; be able to see the results as they come in; and at the end of the session be able to step through what is good/bad/otherwise about the answers on the big screen.
This is important to me because, as a legal academic, part of my role is to teach students how to handle an entirely novel form of writing, which is how to respond to legal problem solving questions.
However, at the moment, there is no possibility for the students to include a line break in their answer. I understand that this would be relatively easy to implement from your end by allowing respondents to use latex code such as '\n', but I don't feel that students should have to learn a new mark-down language in order to respond to a survey. So, ideally, line-breaks should be capable of being placed by just hitting enter.
I appreciate that return/enter submits an answer at the moment, but I'm not sure that this is a valuable use when it is perfectly straightforward to click or tap submit. Even using the program for open-ended quizzes, I find that students often complain about accidentally submitting their answer when they intended a line break.
I also understand that it might be difficult to make this work via SMS, but if it can at least be available for web/app responses, that would be awesome.
Thanks guys. I love what you do.
Tim
Tim Baxter
shared this idea
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. We really appreciate it. Before I get into the specifics, may I ask – about how long are the responses that you are receiving from your students? A rough word count or so would be fantastic, I want to make sure we’re on the same page about length.
Otherwise, there is some technical concerns around adding specific HTML in responses because we don’t want to open any security holes in replies. And, I understand your point that is a large burden on students to learn anyway.
There’s some balance we have between having Enter submit the response instead of a new line. The vast majority of the time we have shorter responses and we want to emphasize speed for real time replies. But, I can understand confusion there. We had a lot of back and forth on which is the appropriate behavior.
Ultimately, I think what I’d like to make for your use case (long responses that are reviewed live, but not immediately upon submission) is a new poll type that could be part of our Surveys. That is geared toward longer replies. Something like an “Essay poll”
Does something like that seem like it would work for you? That’s still a sizable project but would limit any impact we have for our current user interface.
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tom ferna commented
Thanks