Overview of article content:

For information about Power BI or Tableau exercise files, please refer to this separate article: Creating and uploading exercise files.

To create a remote desktop exercise, select “Add Exercise” on Teach, scroll down, and select one of the “Remote Desktop” options. You can either choose to create a Multiple Choice Question or Open Question exercise.

RDE exercises, both the Multiple Choice Question and Open Question flavors, will automatically be multi-step exercises. This means that students can navigate between multiple instructions instead of seeing them all at once. You can see an example of a multi-step exercise below.

In Teach, you can author these multi-step instructions as follows. Click the green “Add Item” button to add a step. For each step, you need to complete both a “Hint” and “Instructions” section. You can choose to add one or multiple instructions in one step, use your best judgment to see what makes the most sense for the exercises. Each hint should map directly to the instruction(s) in that step. They will be shown if a learner asks for a hint for that specific step. Note that the hint shown for the last step (question) has to be added somewhere else. More on that later in this article.

For Multiple Choice RDEs, you need to complete the following fields.

The question you want to show to users. Note that at this point, the information in this field doesn’t show up yet on Campus for Multiple Choice RDEs. You’ll also need to include it in the Context section (see below).

These are the possible answers learners can choose from to answer the question. You can click the green “Add Item” button to add options.

The correct answer is denoted by adding square brackets around it.

For each option, feedback messages need to be added. Make sure that the order maps to the order of the possible answers!

All the way at the bottom, you can see the context field. This is where the context is added. If there’s additional information the learner should know about, you can add it here as well. Make sure it doesn’t get too long though. As mentioned earlier, for now, you’ll have to add the question here for Multiple Choice RDEs.

Lastly, you’ll need to complete the “Hint” section that’s all the way at the bottom. This is the hint that will be shown if learners ask for a hint when they are on the last step (question). This is a nice opportunity to add some guidance about interpreting the visualization to answer the question.

A less guided option is Open Question RDEs. As the name suggests, learners won’t get to choose between options but can insert any answer they want. This prohibits learners from “guessing their way through the course” which makes it an appealing exercise type. Note that you can add multiple questions, however, we suggest maxing it out at two questions and most existing RDEs are one question. For Open Question RDEs, you need to complete the following fields.

Here you’ll have to add:

You can add feedback messages to account for wrong answers. Adding good feedback messages for input that corresponds to common mistakes can help students on their way if they are stuck. You can fill out the pattern without worrying about writing an all-catching regex pattern. DataCamp will take care of refining the regex pattern. For example, if you input 2.14 as a pattern, we’ll convert it so that it accounts for “2,14” and any possible rounding variations.

Note that you always have to include a feedback message that’s a catch-all. This message is displayed if none of the patterns above are matched. The regex pattern that corresponds to this is .* and the message can be a general message like: “That’s not right! Try taking a hint if you’re stuck.“ The feedback messages are sometimes referred to as SCTs or submission correctness texts.

Just like for Multiple Choice RDEs, you have to complete the context field. This is where the context is added. If there’s additional information the learner should know about, you can add it here as well. Make sure it doesn’t get too long though.

Lastly, you’ll need to complete the “Hint” section that’s all the way at the bottom. This is the hint that will be shown if learners ask for a hint when they are on the last step (question). This is a nice opportunity to add some guidance about interpreting the visualization to answer the question.