Drag and drop markers

I'd like to say that your 3 plugins are rather popular, but the drag and drop with markers has a design problem: most users think they should drop the text bubble rather than the target. And that's so even when given clear instructions! I wonder if you have heard this feedback before?
Is there a way you could improve on the design?

I have seen it - on OpenLearn before Christmas; note not on the main OU VLE so I thought it was something Openlearn had done. It was fixed by the January update to Moodle 2.5. Prior to that I think OpenLearn was on Moodle 2.3? But we never had an issue when the main VLE was on 2.3. Anyway that may provide a clue to a solution.

I've never seen that happen! Therefore, I don't know why it is happening for you.

Hi. When answering a question, the markers move slightly every time a new marker is placed. After placing a few markers, previously placed (and marked correctly) markers have been displaced (and marked as incorrect). Any suggestions why this is happening? Cheers

We had this discussion, and over-simplify hugely, we said: some tasks require being able to see a lot at once. The only sensible option for students is to to these tasks on a desktop/laptop/tablet. It just does not make sense to spend a lot of time making the technolgoy cope with mobile-sized screens, that is jsut not a sensible device for the task.
For other quizzes, of course, the option to do them on a mobile is a very good thing.

Hi there, loving the question types you have released!
They seem to work very well, however, when using on a smaller screen size {mobile} (also using a responsive theme), it's not always possible to drag the markers to the correct areas. I don't really know much about this kind of thing, however could it be that if the image sizes and drop zones were based on percentages rather than pixels, it could work on small screen sizes?
Is this / something similar, something that is being worked on? Or is there a work around?
Many thanks
Jona

In fact, the fix is in github, I just have not released a new version here yet. The necssary code change is https://github.com/moodleou/moodle-qtype_ddmarker/commit/808717d9716a337d100c6ca26d2369b32c39c98d

Comment to Austin Powell 9th Jan. That bug (numbers incrementing) looks like a bug I've just reported at the OU. Tim is onto it.

Thanks for answering. Moodle is widely used for language teaching, I think, so these features would be very useful for lots of people. If only the dragables folded into new rows we could
live together with the rest.. Thank you again!

I think the problem is that you are using the question type for something that is slightly different from what it was designed for. That is OK, but it explains why some things don't work perfectly.
We plan to fix the problem with lots of markers overlapping, but I cannot promise when that will happen.
Really, what we need is a new question type for classifying lots of things into a few categories. I wonder if someone will build that?

This is an awesome plugin that opens up new levels of interactivity. At the same time as a language teacher I found some frustrating limitations that I would like to call your attention to:
1) In language teaching most often you have a LARGER number of vocabulary items that the students should put into groups according to their stress patterns, or some semantic logic. Unfortunately, all the dragable items are always crammed into one line as you can see here where I wanted to use only 20 items: (username: student, pass: student) http://www.mood26.interangol.hu/course/view.php?id=8 The excess items cover the others with the result of an intangible mass when there would be plenty of space below the background image to fold the dragable items into a second or even a third line!
2) There is no mass input possibility to create all the draggable TEXT items in one step by inserting a text from Excel in a column in a text box (csv files, line breaks etc).
3) When you want to associate five vocabulary items with the same category (drop zone) it would be much more practical to be able to choose all the five items for that category one by one, rather than having to re-define the same drop zone five times for each item separately!

That is odd. I don't see any changes in https://github.com/moodleou/moodle-qtype_ddmarker/compare/v1.3...v1.4 that might cause that. It certainly should not happen.

We are currently using Moodle 2.5.1+ (Build: 20130712) and just updated this plugin from version 1.3 (2013070100) to the new version 1.4. After doing this on our test server, we found that when we had multiple markers in a question all set to "Number 1" after the upgrade, they all increased in numerical value until becoming infinite.
Comparison screenshot can be found here:
Not sure if this is a bug in the upgrade or what. Just before this upgrade we did upgrade the gapselect and ddimageortext to their latest versions also. Issue didn't appear until we upgraded the dd-marker plugin however. We will refrain from upgrading our live server (which is functioning fine on the previous versions currently) to the latest version until we know if this is a bug or some issue on our end.

The Moodle 2.5-compatible version was working fine in Moodle 2.6, but there were some recent bug-fixes, so I just pused a new version here. Upgrading is recommended.

Hi Jeroen,
You seem to have an older version of ddmarker installed. The newer version of ddmarker uses the method you have changed to using. You might want to update the plug in and make sure you have the latest gapselect and ddimageortext plug in code too.