Available for Authors with extended access.

When candidates answer an essay question, they have a toolbar for formatting and basic tasks. This article explains how to make a custom toolbar to control the formatting options and features available to candidates. It also explains how to add the custom toolbar to an Essay question.

What is an Essay Toolbar?

When candidates answer an essay question in Inspera Assessment, they have a toolbar available to allow for simple formatting and basic tasks like making text bold or italic or copying and pasting text.

The purpose of the configurable essay toolbar is to enable institutions to customise the toolbar to the specific requirements in the question. This can be useful if you want to restrict the available formatting options and features. The custom toolbar is then applied to a particular essay question.

Instructions

Only Authors with extended access can create and edit custom toolbars, however, all Authors can use published toolbars.

• Create the custom toolbar

  1. Go to the Author module, and select Essay Toolbars from the dropdown menu. 

     

  2. Fom here you can copy an existing toolbar from the list, or click on Create new button on the top right. You must name the toolbar before you can publish it.

• Configure the custom toolbar

  • The configuration interface shows the preview of the toolbar is on the left panel, while the configuation happens on the right panel. The code for the different buttons and options that are standard in the toolbar can be edited to remove buttons or options. 
  • The code for basic styles looks like this:
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  • You can remove single lines of code to remove single options like Bold or Italic. You can even remove all of the code to remove all buttons and options.

  • We encourage you to play around and test, because you can always reset to default settings (up to the right). 

    

  • Be careful with commas and brackets; too many or too few will prevent the code from working.
  • All available configurations are already in the default configuration. 

• Publish the custom toolbar

  1. Once you are ready to publish the toolbar, click Publish now at the top right of the page. 

     

  2. You will be presented with a review of the toolbar, where the name and configuration are validated. You will not be able to publish the toolbar if the configuration is not valid. 
  3. When everything is green, you can publish the toolbar. It will then become available for all Authors.

Make changes to a custom toolbar

You cannot edit a toolbar while it is published. To unpublish it, click the button in the top right corner. Make your changes and then publish the toolbar again when you are ready.

When you publish changes, the new version of the toolbar is applied to all questions that use that toolbar. Be careful with your changes, as they may impact tests that are already planned.

Add the toolbar to an Essay question

1. Create a new Essay question or edit an existing one to add the custom toolbar.
2. At the right-hand panel, go to the Advanced tab and select the toolbar you want to use.
3. Preview the question to see what the toolbar will look like for candidates.