Guidelines for Learnosity Custom Questions and Features

The guideline you need to start building your custom question/feature with Learnosity APIs using your preferred toolkit and languages.

More Custom Questions documentation is available at the Learnosity Help Site
An official Learnosity open-source project.

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Table of Contents

• Overview: what's in the guideline?
• Available Demo Scripts
• Test your Custom Question
• Publish your custom question
• Development Recommendations
• Next steps: additional documentation
• Contributing to this project
• License

Overview: what's in the guideline?

The Learnosity Custom Question/Feature Guideline provides the complete demos of some custom questions/features built by Learnosity engineers which you can use as a base of your custom question/feature project.

The following demos have been included in this repository:

• Box and whisker
• Custom question skeleton

Each demo has the following structure:

• package.json: contains the information about your custom question/feature project. This file also contains some handy scripts that you can execute to quickly develop your custom question/feature.
• webpack.config.js: is used to transpile and bundle your custom question/feature code.
• assessment.php: a local Assessment demo page to help you to develop your custom question/feature quickly.
• authoring.php: a local Assessment demo page to help you to develop the Schemas and Authoring layout for your custom question/feature.
• authoring_custom_layout.html: the Authoring HTML layout of your custom question/feature.
• debugServerScorer.js: a local Assessment server side demo page to help you to test the behavior of your custom question's scorer in the server side locally.
• src: the source code folder
  • src/question.js: the frontend entry point of your custom question/feature. This file is responsible to generate the UI in the browser of you custom question/feature.
  • src/scorer.js: the server side entry point of your custom question/feature. This file is responsible to score the stored response of your custom question/feature and should not contain any UI related or any DOM manipulation libraries.
• scss: the SASS source code folder

Note: Note: for any files hosted outside Learnosity, you may need to set CORS privileges for such files. See more information in this article: Working with Firewalls & Domain Whitelisting.

Available Demo Scripts

1. Box and Whisker Demo

• Project Location: demos/box-and-whisker

2. Custom Question Skeleton Demo

• A clean custom question skeleton you can leverage to start working on your custom question
• Project Location: demos/custom-question-skeleton

Scripts

# Start the localhost server to start developing your custom question
yarn dev

# Build the production ready code of your custom question
yarn prod

# Test your scorer's behavior in the server side. Update question/response in debugeServerScorer.js to test
yarn debug-server-scorer

# Run Jest unit-tests
yarn unit-tests

# Run Jest unit-tests in watch mode
yarn unit-tests-watch

Test your custom question

Assessment demo using Questions API: http://localhost:12345/assessment.php

Authoring demo using Author API: http://localhost:12345/authoring.php

Publish your custom question

• Once your custom question is ready, run yarn prod to generate the production ready build then copy the content of the dist folder and your authoring_custom_layout.html to your server and make sure those files are accessible on the web.
• To test your production build, in your assessment.php file, point the js and css files to the location of your files

"js": {
  "question": "YOUR-SERVER-URL/question.js",
  "scorer": "YOUR-SERVER-URL/scorer.js"
},
"css": "YOUR-SERVER-URL/question.css"

Development Recommendations

1. Leverage predefined Learnosity components

Avoid building the following default components to keep the consistent look-and-feel with Learnosity UI

• Check Answer button

  • Syntax: lrnUtils.renderComponent('CheckAnswerButton', wrapperElement)

  • // Example:
    export default class MyCustomQuestion {
        constructor(init, lrnUtils) {
          const checkAnswerWrapperElement = document.createElement('DIV');
    
          init.el.appendChild(checkAnswerWrapperElement);
    
          this.checkAnswerButton = lrnUtils.renderComponent('CheckAnswerButton', checkAnswerWrapperElement);
          ...
        }
    

  • Public methods:
    • remove(): Remove the component

      • this.checkAnswerButton = lrnUtils.renderComponent('CheckAnswerButton', checkAnswerWrapperElement);
        this.checkAnswerButton.remove();
        

• Suggested Answers list

• Syntax: lrnUtils.renderComponent('SuggestedAnswersList', wrapperElement)

  • // Example:
    export default class MyCustomQuestion {
        constructor(init, lrnUtils) {
          const checkAnswerWrapperElement = document.createElement('DIV');
    
          init.el.appendChild(suggestedListWrapperElement);
    
          this.suggestedAnswersList = lrnUtils.renderComponent('SuggestedAnswersList', suggestedListWrapperElement);
          ...
        }
    

  • Public methods:
    • remove(): Remove the component

      • this.suggestedAnswersList = lrnUtils.renderComponent('SuggestedAnswersList', suggestedListWrapperElement);
        this.checkAnswerButton.remove();
        

    • reset(): Reset the components to its default state. All rendered answers will be removed.

      • this.suggestedAnswersList = lrnUtils.renderComponent('SuggestedAnswersList', suggestedListWrapperElement);
        this.checkAnswerButton.reset();
        

    • setAnswers(Array<{ index: number, label: string }>): Render the answers based on provided array

      • this.suggestedAnswersList = lrnUtils.renderComponent('SuggestedAnswersList', suggestedListWrapperElement);
        this.suggestedAnswersList.setAnswers([
            { index: 0, label: 'A'},
            { index: 1, label: 'B'},
            { index: 2, label: 'C'}
        ]);
        

2. Leverage predefined Learnosity style

You can leverage the predefined validation UI style of Learnosity API by wrapping your custom question/feature content under the DOM structure below

<div class="lrn-bnw lrn-response-validation-wrapper">
    <div class="lrn_response_input">
        RENDER YOUR CUSTOM QUESTION/FEATURE ELEMENT IN HERE
    </div>            
</div>

Adding lrn_correct (when all correct answers are provided) or lrn_incorrect (when the provided answer is not correct) to lrn_response_input will render the proper validation UI state to your custom question/feature.

3. Best practices: using a prefix for CSS class names

When creating a Learnosity Custom Question, it’s important to prefix the CSS class names being used inside your custom Question UI. You should avoid using a generic class name like .btn. Instead, you should add a prefix to it like .company-name-my-custom-question-btn to avoid CSS conflict with the host page and the CSS used by the Learnosity API.

Next steps: additional documentation

You can find more detailed documentation in the Learnosity Help site. If you are new to Learnosity Custom Questions we highly recommend starting here.

Contributing to this project

Adding new features or fixing bugs

Contribution in the form of [Issues] and [PRs] are welcome.

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License

This project is licensed under MIT License. Read more.

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