Canvas Update: New Quiz Fill in the Blank Question Type Modification

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Canvas has updated one of the New Quiz question types. With this change, it’s easier to create fill-in-the blank questions.

Previously, you had to type all your text then highlight specific words or phrases and hit “enter” to create blanks. With this update, you can easily mark the blanks as you go. Each fill-in-the-blank answer needs to be surrounded by backticks (just above “tab” on your keyboard. It took me way too long to find it since I don’t use that key frequently).

Once you have your blanks marked, you can choose the answer type (open entry, dropdown, or word bank) for each blank. These types then have different options for either the specificity of text match (for “open entry” blanks) or answer plus distractor(s) (for all other answer types).

Let’s look at an example of the answer types. In this question, the first blank is an open entry (student types the answer), the second is a drop-down, and the third is a word bank for students to select from. Both the drop-down and word bank blanks have distractors added to them, and the fill-in-the-blank answer is set to “exact match.”