Creating Essay Submissions

An Essay content type can be used for various types of exercises. In this tutorial, we will use Essay to get a summary of the book the learner has read. Also, we will define some keywords for which we will give points/feedback if the learner mentions them in his or her answer.

Accessing H5P in Canvas

You can access H5P in Canvas through the Rich Content Editor (RCE), which is accessible via the edit view of Page, Assignment, Discussion Board, Announcement and Quiz questions. 

For this example, we will be adding H5P onto a Canvas page. The first thing you will need to do is either open the page you want to embed the H5P content into or create a new page. Then click the ‘Edit’ button which will open the RCE. (You will automatically go into edit mode if you create a new page.) 

Next, you will need to locate H5P in the RCE toolbar.


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Clicking on that menu item will open a pop-up showing your H5P library. From here, you will have the option to either insert previously created content or create something new. 


Select the New content option and choose Essay from the list of Content types:


Creating an Essay

The Essay editor should now appear. The main part of the editor looks like this:


The Essay editor consists of Task description, Help text, Sample solution and Keywords.

Task description 

In the Task description field, give the learner basic instructions or introduce the problem to be solved. Use this text for the task description eg. Please describe the novel "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien with at least 100 characters and up to 500 characters.

Help text

In the Help text field, give the learner a line to help start the writing process. This text will appear as a placeholder text inside the input field where the learner will type his answer. This text is optional.

Sample solution

In the Sample solution, show the learner an example of how the finished essay can look. The student will see this sample when done. This text is optional.


Keywords

Using keywords we define how many points we will attribute for the appearance of a specific word. In this example we want to set points for these keywords:

Keyword
Variations
Points
Bilbo
 
10
Gandalf
 
20
Smaug
 
20
dwarfs 
dwarves
10
adventure
quest, journey
10

It is possible to add variations for each keyword, for example: (adventure or quest or journey). The learner will get 10 points if they mention any variation of this word.

Start filling in the keywords and points from the information in the table above. Add new keywords by clicking on the "Add keyword"  button and if a keyword has variations add variations by clicking on the "Add variation"  button. If the word has more than one variation, use the "Add variation" button for each new variation. The points for each keyword are set under Points, Options and Feedback group. 

When you are done adding all keywords, it should look like this:



Various options are available per keyword such as:

  • Points - The number of points a learner will earn if this word is used
  • Occurrences - How many times we should give the points for this word
  • Case sensitive - Is the answer case sensitive or not
  • Forgive minor mistakes - Accepting minor spelling mistakes ( 3-9 characters: 1 mistake, >9 characters: 2 mistakes)
  • Feedback if keyword included - Provide feedback if the user has used this word
  • Feedback if keyword missing - Provide feedback if the user did not use this word 

Behavioural settings

Below are the optional settings for this content type, like minimum and a maximum number of characters the learner is supposed to type, enabling Retry and more:


Finishing up

Save & Insert to view your finished Essay.