A Clearer View of Your Question Library

A type-aware preview for every question type — about twelve words, drawn from the fields that actually carry the question.

May 19, 2026 — By Brent Miller

I came back from a week off in southern Spain with clarity of vision — and I wanted to share it with our users.

Flowers in bloom. Late dinners. No laptop. By day six, a question that had been quietly nagging me for months finally had an answer.

What “Prompt” Doesn’t Tell You

Here it is. When you open the Lesson Commons Editor and look at your library — dozens, hundreds, eventually thousands of questions you’ve authored — what do you actually see? A type. A tag. A column labeled Prompt. And that’s what was nagging me — and probably you too.

Because “prompt” doesn’t mean the same thing for every kind of question. A True/False prompt is the statement itself — recognizable at a glance. But a Sentence Transformation prompt is a combination of three elements, and the first is not the target structure. Same problem for cloze passages, matching pairs, ordering lists: the content that makes the question itself lives somewhere other than the prompt.

A Different Recipe for Every Type

So we fixed it. The Editor now generates a type-aware preview — about twelve words, pulled from the fields that actually carry the question — for every one of our question types. Same idea behind the scenes; a different recipe for each.

Here they are, shortest to longest:

True/False — Water boils at 100°C at sea level under standard atmospheric pressure.
Multiple Choice — Which best describes the role of the mitochondria?
Short Answer — What is the capital of France?
Essay — Discuss the social and economic impact of the Industrial Revolution.
Simple Gap-Fill — I saw [an] elephant at the zoo yesterday.
Sentence Transformation — The [last time] [I saw John] was three weeks ago.
Word-Bank Cloze — Yesterday I went to [the] park near my house. In [the] park. . .
Multi-Gap Cloze — She walked [through] the park and sat [on] a bench [by] the . . .
Multiple-Choice Cloze — The weather was [so] cold we stayed indoors. We [watched] a movie.
Matching (Pairs) — John Locke → Government’s authority comes from the consent of the governed. (+3 more)
Matching (Classification) — past simple → a year ago; present perfect → all my life
Ordering (Word Level) — The Earth goes round the sun.
Ordering (Sentence Level) — 1. Glucose enters the cell and is split into two pyruvate molecules. (+4 more)
Ordering (Paragraph Level) — 1. For most of European history, money meant coin: gold, silver, copper. (+3 more)
Placement — When a vaccine enters the body, it carries… [270 words, 6 gaps]

The One That Got Away

The Placement question type, I’ll admit, was impossible to summarise. A 270-word passage with six missing sentences won’t fit in twelve words — so the preview is a teaser, not a summary. Open it in the Editor, friend.

Why This Matters

What this means for you: when your library is clear at a glance, you save time finding and reusing the questions you’ve already written. You don’t need to rewrite something you already have. Just find it; and optionally edit and repackage it.

Build your first lesson →

… and see your questions the way they were meant to be seen.

Lesson Commons is an educational software platform for teachers and trainers. The Editor, Learn platform, and LC-JSON open format are in active development. Follow updates at lessoncommons.com/news.