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Flashcard Decks

A flashcard deck is a named set of question/answer cards students can practice against. Students work through a deck one card at a time and sort each card into a mastered pile or back into the practice pile. There is no scheduling, no scoring, and no gradebook connection: the value of the feature to you is the practice data it records, which is reported per deck, per card, and per student. Open Course Settings → Flashcard Decks in the course navigation bar (manage/course/flashcard-decks).

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Who can manage decks

Instructors and graders both get the Flashcard Decks entry, and both can create decks, add and edit cards, delete decks, and read every analytics view. Nothing on these pages is instructor-only. The flashcards feature flag governs the student side only. Turning it off removes the Flashcards entry from the student course menu, and leaves Course Settings → Flashcard Decks exactly where it was. See Feature flags for what each flag hides.
The flag decides whether students see Flashcards in their menu; it is not an access control, and turning it off is not a way to withhold a deck. Deleting the deck is the only way to take it away from students, and deletion is destructive: it removes every card, all student progress, and the deck’s activity data, with no restore. Read Deleting decks and cards before you go that route. Feature flags covers the same boundary for every module.

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Decks are visible to students the moment you create them

There is no draft state, no release date, and no publish step. A deck appears in the student deck list as soon as you click Create Deck, and every card in it is readable from that instant. That has one practical consequence worth planning around: if you create the deck first and add cards afterwards, students see an empty deck in the meantime, which opens to “No Cards Available”. Author the cards in the create dialog — see Creating a deck — if you would rather the deck arrive complete.

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The deck table

The landing page lists the course’s decks in a sortable, filterable table: Click any header to sort by it, and type in the box under a header to filter on that column. The table starts sorted newest-first, shows 20 rows per page, and offers 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 rows through the Show: selector at the bottom. Two buttons sit in the top-right corner: Create New Deck, and View Analytics, which opens the course-wide deck analytics.

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Creating a deck

Create New Deck opens a dialog with three fields:
  • Deck Name is required, and must be between 2 and 100 characters.
  • Description is optional and capped at 500 characters. It is rendered as formatted text everywhere it appears, including on the student’s deck card.
  • Flashcard Configuration (YAML) is optional, and holds the deck’s cards. Load Sample Template fills the editor with a worked two-card example.
Leave the YAML empty to create the deck with no cards and add them one at a time afterwards.

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The card YAML

The editor expects a single cards list. Each entry needs a title, a prompt, and an answer:
All three keys are required on every card and none may be blank. If one is missing, the save is rejected with a YAML Error naming the position of the offending card (“Card 3 is missing required fields”), and neither the deck nor any of its cards is created. prompt and answer are rendered as formatted text on the card faces, so the block style shown above (|) is the useful one — it preserves the line breaks that lists and code blocks need. Card order follows the order of the list.
Titles show up on their own in three places students and staff both see: the label above the question, the tiles in the student’s mastered pile, and the Card column of the analytics tables. A title like “Card 4” makes every one of those unreadable. Write titles that identify the card.

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Editing a deck

Click a deck’s name to open it. The page is headed Edit Flashcard Deck with a card-count badge and the deck’s creation and last-updated timestamps, then the deck’s name and description, then every card in order — numbered #1, #2, and so on — with its title, prompt, and answer rendered as they will appear to students. A sidebar on the left holds three entries: Deck Home, Analytics, and Student Analytics.

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Adding and editing single cards

Add Flashcard opens a dialog with Title, Prompt, and Answer, all three required. Edit on any card opens the same three fields filled in; the Update Flashcard button stays disabled until you change something. Editing a card’s text leaves student progress alone — a student who had already marked that card Got It! still has it in their mastered pile, now with the new wording. Deleting a card is the destructive option: it also discards every student’s mastery record for that card, and it cannot be undone.

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Editing the whole deck as YAML

Edit Deck (YAML) in the top-right corner reopens the deck’s cards as YAML. Each existing card comes back carrying an id, and on save:
  • cards whose id you left in place are updated,
  • cards you added without an id are created,
  • cards you removed from the YAML are deleted from the deck, along with student progress on them,
  • and card order follows the order of the list.
An id that matches nothing in this deck — usually a copy/paste from another deck — is treated as a new card, and the save warns you that it did so.
This editor shows only the first ten cards of the deck. On a longer deck you are editing a partial view, and saving from it can leave the deck’s card order scrambled — no cards are lost, but the sequence students see may change. For decks larger than ten cards, use Add Flashcard and the per-card Edit buttons instead. This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.

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Analytics

There are three analytics views. All of them count actions students took, not correctness — a card has no right answer to check against, so every number below is a tally of button presses, page views, or elapsed time.
Opening a deck through View as student records nothing, against either the student or you. It also starts you on a full practice pile with nothing mastered, because it shows you a fresh deck rather than that student’s progress.

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Course-wide deck analytics

View Analytics on the deck table gives two bar charts covering every deck in the course:
  • Deck Views — how many times a student opened each deck. This counts openings, not students, so one student returning ten times reads the same as ten students arriving once.
  • Deck Progress Resets — how many times a student emptied their mastered pile for that deck, using either Reset Progress or Start Over.

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Aggregated card analytics

The Analytics entry in a deck’s sidebar is headed Aggregated Card Analytics, and gives six bar charts, each showing the deck’s top ten cards on one metric, highest first, summed across all students:
Every chart is ranked highest-first, including % Got It — so that one shows the ten cards students got most easily, which is rarely the question you are asking. To find the cards students struggle with, read Avg. Time for “Keep Trying” and Returned to Deck, or sort the per-card table on Student Analytics by ‘Keep Trying’ Count.

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Student analytics

Student Analytics in a deck’s sidebar has two tabs. Both are sortable, carry a filter box under every column, paginate at 20 rows with a 10/20/50/100 selector, and have their own Export CSV button. Both read “No student interaction data available for this deck.” until at least one student has opened it, and a student who has not opened the deck has no row at all. Aggregated View — one row per student:
Cards Not Mastered is not “cards the student has not reached yet”. It counts only cards that were mastered at some point and then returned to the practice pile — including everything returned in bulk by Reset Progress. A student who has never pressed Got It! on a card contributes nothing to this column, so a student who has barely started the deck shows zero in both count columns. Read Cards Mastered against the deck’s card count for coverage.
Detailed View — one row per student per card, with the student’s name, the Card title, and then Prompt Views, Answer Views, ‘Got It’ Count, ‘Keep Trying’ Count, Returned to Deck, Avg. Answer Time (s), Avg. ‘Got It’ Time (s), and Avg. ‘Keep Trying’ Time (s).
The Card column of the Detailed View names only the deck’s first ten cards. Rows beyond that show a numeric placeholder such as “Card 412” rather than the card’s title. Sorting, filtering, and the export still work, so the data is all there — it is the label that is missing. This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.
Both exports write exactly the columns of the table they sit above. See Exports for the file names.

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Reusing decks in a new term

Decks are copied between courses from the command line, not the interface:
The copy brings each deck’s name, description, and every card, in order. It does not bring student progress or any recorded activity — the new course’s decks start with clean analytics. Use --deck <id or name> in place of --all for a single deck; a name that matches more than one deck is rejected, and you are asked for the deck’s id instead. You need access to both courses. pawtograder flashcards list --class <course> prints the decks in a course with their card counts. See Command line tools for installation and authentication, and the CLI reference for every flag.

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Deleting decks and cards

The delete button in the deck table’s Actions column asks to confirm (“This action cannot be undone”) and then removes the deck, every card in it, and all student progress and recorded activity for it. There is no soft delete and no restore. Deleting a single card, from the card’s own delete button or by removing it from the YAML editor, discards every student’s mastery record for that card, and cannot be undone.
Deletion is the only way to take a deck away from students, and it takes the analytics with it. If you want the practice data but not the deck in front of students, export the two student analytics tables to CSV first.

Flashcards (student view)

What students see and do in a deck, and what the two piles mean to them.

Feature flags

The flashcards flag, what it hides, and what it does not.

Exports

Every CSV in the course, including the two flashcard analytics tables.

Command line tools

Copying decks, surveys, and assignments into a new term.