I’ve been busy using Memrise as a source. I really like the website, thanks for providing it! (New on the forum though.)
But one thing that I feel that misses is the ability to customise the ‘Mark Typing Strictly’. Currently, the button includes things such as spacing, capitalisation, and accents, which is very useful.
However, if I am honest… I would like to tell something.
Explanation
I cannot select whether I want to mark strictly for typing, tapping, word order and other types, and/or cannot select specific things, for example. E.g. the ability to say that I want spacing and accents to be marked strictly, but not the capitalisation. Nor can I select which signs would be considered accents and which not.
This leads to strange examples. For example, assume I have a sentence like ‘Il est un homme trés bien.’ in French, and that the English translation is ‘He is a very good man.’.
In the current system of strict marking, typing ‘Il est un homme trés bien’ would not be correct, but so would ‘Il est un homme tres bien’ be incorrect, too. Punctuation and accents are diferent, in my opinion.
Alternative answers also do not seem to be clear. From what I have gathered, the ; is now the way to mark those alternative answers
Suggestion:
It would be nice if the old ‘strict answer marking’ button had an ‘Advanced’ option, where you could customise it for the whole course. One then could, per option individually, select whether:
• spacing
• capitalisation
• accents
• punctuation
should be marked. That way one would for example be able to say that one only needs to mark strictly for spacing, but not for the rest. This would lead to less frustration for both course makers (who continuously have to put in alternative answers) and for learners (who otherwise would have to answer perfectly everytime).
Other Ideas:
As for accents and punctuation, there is another idea; some languages use different ways to mark those two. Greek uses a ; mark for questions, thus it could be useful be able to determine if an accent would be correct or not. I don’t think this one idea will happen though.
Being able to mark if a certain word order should be correct, that would be useful too. I think that the ‘Alternative Answers’ button shows an unclear explanation, and thus that that specific topic should be more fully covered.
A completely different idea is to also include an explanation about the columns: at the moment, it is nowhere told that if you put in a semicolon ; in between words in a column, it will get accepted as a different answer too. This leads to much confusion and frustration of course makers and learners alike, because they presume they should write it as [word],[word].
I hope I explained and expressed my worries and suggestions clearly enough.