Previously on Podsie, short answer question answers were limited to a single word, and the student was required to type in the answer exactly. We've introduced typo detection and this changes two things: 1) if a student types in an answer that's close (close is defined by our typo detection algorithm) to the correct answer, we show the prompt in the screenshot below and give them one additional attempt to answer the question 2) short answer question responses are no longer limited to a single word, so you can have spaces, and instead, now they are limited to a maximum length of 40 characters.

Typo detection is not enabled for short answer questions that have numeric answers or for short answer questions that have answers less than 3 characters.

We've gotten feedback that freezing the personal deck is confusing, so we've updated the flow.

When you freeze a class' personal deck in the Settings page, the Class page now has a badge that indicates that the personal decks are frozen, and the Personal Deck Cards Due column will show as N/A.

In the Personal Deck tab of the class, the data over time view will show that 0 questions are due for the dates you have personal deck frozen.

Lastly, in the Settings page, there is now a progress bar when you unfreeze the personal deck.

You can now export assignment results as CSV:

1. We've cut down on the number of clicks it takes to handle a Flagged Response in Notifications.

2. We added the ability to clone an assignment. You can use this to quickly set up a new assignment that has all of the same questions that an existing assignment has:

We added a new feature for multiple choice and short answer questions. Previously, when students missed these kinds of questions, the correct answer would pop up for them right away. Some teachers on Podsie shared that for certain questions, they'd prefer if students did not see the correct answer right away, and instead were encouraged to engage with the 'Deeper Learning' more first in order to deduce the answer.

To do facilitate this, we've added a new field to the question creation form called Number of Attempts until Answer Shown:

By default, this field is set to "1", which means the answer will still show right away (since the student will have attempted the question once). If you want students to take a couple more attempts before the correct answer shows, then you can set it to a value higher than 1.

If you do that, then you are required to provide a deeper learning.

On the student side, this is what they'll see for questions that don't show the correct answer right away:

We added a new field to assignments that allows you to control when the assignment will become available to students:

You can leave this field blank if you'd like for the assignment to launch to your students right away.

Please note that for Personal Deck Assignments, the questions won't be pulled from students' personal decks into the Personal Deck Assignment until the Launch At time has passed. 

We've added the ability to add variations to a question. Here's how it works.

- Go to the 'Edit Questions' page under an assignment.

- Once you're there, you can either select a question that's part of the assignment, or an existing question from older assignments:

- Then, click on the pencil icon, which now has a number badge over it:

- Once you're there, you can add variations to this question:

What this means is that once a student comes across this question in their personal decks, instead of seeing that same question every single time, the student will see one of the questions out of the combination of the base question and its variations (the logic for how a question is selected is explained if you hover over the 'How does this work?' text).

This goal here is prevent students from purely memorizing answers to a question over time without understanding the underlying concept that's being assessed.

We set up the ability to add math symbols and formulas. We added some shortcuts for some very common symbols and notations:

However, that 'Enter formula' field is very flexible, as it uses LaTex, which allows you to express mathematical and scientific expressions:

https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Mathematical_expressions

As an example, try typing in a^2 + b^2 = c^2 into the formula field.

A couple of minor improvements:

1. We decided to auto-archive your notifications after you submit your assessment of a free response in order to make that whole process more convenient.

2. We also stopped marking the first multiple choice as "correct" by default. We heard that this was causing some inadvertent mistakes where the wrong answer choice got marked correct, so we hope this prevents that moving forward!

We've just added the ability to select individual students for assigning assignments in addition to entire classes.