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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.
Permissions
Creating and editing toolbars is only available for Authors with extended access. The option will be available in the Author drop down menu.
All authors can use the published toolbars.
Make a custom toolbar
Setup
Get started by creating a new Essay Toolbar, or by copying an existing one from the list.
Give the toolbar preset a name at the top left. The name is required to publish the toolbar preset.
Configuration - preview and design
The left panel will show the preview of the toolbar, while the configuration will happen in 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:
You can remove single lines to remove single options like Bold or Italic. Or you can even remove all of the code to remove all buttons/options.
We encourage you to play around and test, because you can always reset to default. Be careful of commas and brackets, too many or too few will not work.
What can be added to the toolbar
At the moment, all available configurations are already in the default configuration.
Publishing the essay toolbar
Once you are ready to publish the toolbar, all you have to do is to click on Publish now at the top right of the page.
You will be presented with a review of the toolbar, where name, and configuration are validated. You will not be able to publish the toolbar if the configuration is not valid.
When everything is green, you can publish the toolbar. It will then become available for all authors.
Making changes to the toolbar
The toolbar cannot be edited while it is published. To unpublish, click on the button at the top right. Make the necessary changes and publish the toolbar when you are ready.
Note: When the changes are published, the new version of the toolbar will be applied to all questions the toolbar is added to. Be careful with changes as they might impact tests that are already planned.
Adding the toolbar to an Essay question
This part is available for all authors.
Create a new Essay question or edit an existing one to add the custom toolbar. At the right panel, go to Advanced and Select the toolbar of choice. Preview the question to see what the toolbar will look like for the candidates.