Turn passive lessons into active learning with Questions

Where the idea came from

A lot of the early courses built on Tiny Courses were long stretches of text with nothing to do but scroll. Creators kept telling us the same thing: learners would read a whole lesson and remember almost none of it a week later. That's not really a writing problem, it's a design problem. People retain information when they have to do something with it, even briefly, and reading on its own doesn't ask anything of the brain.

So we built a block you can drop anywhere inside a lesson, not just at the end. Ask about the paragraph someone just read, and a passive scroll turns into a short, deliberate pause.

Four ways to ask, one place to build them

You don't need four different tools for four different question styles. Single choice and multiple choice cover most quick checks. True or false works well when you just want someone to confirm they caught the point. And when there isn't one right answer worth grading, free-form lets someone type their own response instead of picking from a list.

• Single choice — one correct answer from a short list
• Multiple choice — more than one answer can be right
• True or false — a fast, low-friction recall check
• Free-form — open text for reflection, not grading

Outcomes make feedback feel like teaching, not marking

Every graded question can carry its own outcome text for a correct and an incorrect answer, so what a learner sees isn't a generic "Correct!" banner. You can write something that explains why an answer works, or nudge someone back to the part of the lesson that covers it. Get a single or multiple choice question wrong and you can try again — we track the attempt, so a retry feels like a normal part of learning rather than a penalty.

Free-form answers work differently on purpose. There's no right or wrong to mark, so instead of a pass or fail, you write a short response that acknowledges what someone said and points them toward what to think about next.

What it looks like from the learner's side

Questions sit inline with the rest of your lesson and pick up your Space's own colours and type, so they read like part of the course rather than a plugin someone bolted on afterwards. If a block has more than one question, learners move through them one at a time with simple back and forward controls, and their answers are saved as they go.

And from yours

Open a course's Analytics tab and you'll find a Question Health panel showing the graded correct rate at a glance, alongside how many free-form answers came in. If almost everyone is missing the same question, that's rarely a sign your learners weren't paying attention. It's usually a sign the question, or the lesson right before it, needs a second pass.

That loop — ask, see what's landing, rewrite the bit that isn't — is really the whole point of this block. Questions aren't there to catch people out. They're there to give you a reason to keep improving a course after you've already published it.