What is it?
A Markup block is a phase authoring component that allows the author to upload an image or PDF file for learners to view and annotate with drawings or labels.
If you would like learners to upload a file instead, please refer to the file upload block.
Interactive
Once you’ve uploaded a file, you can choose to make the markup block interactive or not as a configurable block setting. If interactive, learners will be able to draw shapes on the image or leave annotations on the PDF.
Image markup
Allele supports most image file types, including .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .webp, and .avif. With image markup, the instructor can draw informational shapes or create correct areas on the image. Informational shapes appear as yellow and are displayed to learners. They can be used to highlight or label a specific part of the image.
Correct areas, on the other hand, do not display to learners but are used to determine the correctness of the learner’s markup. Correct areas can only be added if the interactive block setting is checked.
Other configurable settings include the shapes that learners are able to draw, the max number of drawings they can make, and the size of the uploaded image.
Correctness
You can configure how correctness is determined for a learner’s image markup response with the “Correctness” block setting. Choosing one of these options (“Any (at least 1)”, “All”, or “X out of Y”) will tell the system how many correct areas the learner must identify for the response to be considered correct.
Whether or not a learner identifies a correct area is based on the learner’s drawn shape:
- Point: the point must be inside the area
- Arrow: the arrow must end inside the area
- Circle: the circle’s center point must be inside the area, and area ratio must be at least 0.5
- Rectangle: the rectangle’s center point must be inside the area, and the area ratio must be at least 0.5
The area ratio means that the shapes must be similar in size. The formula is as follows, where AreaLS is the area of the learner’s shape and AreaCA is the area of the correct area:
In plain terms, this means that the learner’s drawn circle or rectangle can be no smaller than half as small and no larger than twice as large as the correct area to be considered correct.
PDF markup
The Markup block also supports PDF markup. Learners can view a PDF, download it, or, using the interactive setting, enter a writing mode and add any number of annotations to it.
Did you know?
Markup can be scored like any other scorable block. You can configure the scoring rules as a phase-wide setting or a block-level setting.