The image highlight question type is being deprecated with the release of 2020.3.LTS, at the end of October 2020. We recommend customers use the drawing question type for any new learning content that involves a student highlighting areas of an image.

All existing learning content, created using the old image highlight question type shall still be accessible and editable for customers moving forward. 

Why is it being deprecated?

We released the drawing question type in 2019, packed with flexibility and using the latest technology available. We also incorporated "best practices" lessons we have learned from our 10+ years in building digital questions in the assessment space. 

This makes the drawing question one of the most user friendly, reliable and extensible questions on offer for content creators. It can be used in the same manner as the old image highlight question, where an uploaded image can be highlighted, but also offers authors more functionality out of the box. This includes the ability to draw straight lines, label images with text or use a compass to bisect lines.

We've also done lots of work under the hood to make drawing efficient and performant. 

As such, we've decided to deprecate image highlight in favour of the more robust drawing question type, from the release date of 2020.3.LTS (October 2020) onwards.

Note, you can still edit existing image highlight content, and will always be able to. However, using our 2020.3.LTS or later version APIs, we recommend that any new content you create which involves highlighting images, should be created using the drawing question type. 

Migrating image highlight learning content over to drawing

Migrating your learning content from image highlight to the drawing question type is achievable. This can be actioned by changing the "type" in the question JSON from "highlight" to "drawing".

However, if you are aware of common practices by your authors to skew the images, please note when migrating to drawing, we will respect the original image aspect ratio. In essence, any images that have been deliberately skewed, will be unskewed.

Also remember, whilst image highlight question type is being deprecated, it will still be available up until the end of life date of the 2020.2.LTS version (October 2022), and always in item mode. We do recommend new content is published using the drawing question type, as its support will continue into the future.

Note: If you do encounter any issue with the unskewing aspect, we would love it if you could reach out to our support team and share with us some more details around your use case.