Online Escape Room Tool Guide

With adaptive release, instructors can create a set of rules to control how content is released to students in their courses. The rules may be related to availability, date and time, individual usernames, membership in course groups, review status of another item in the course, and Grade Center items such as scores, attempts, and calculated columns. 

For example, you can load up all the content for your virtual escape room into Blackboard, but students must meet certain criteria to release the next stage of the puzzle.  You may choose to have your students watch a video, then tick a box to say they’ve watched it.  This then releases a set of questions that they must answer – perhaps by searching through your Blackboard module, or by watching the video again (these would be the hands on activities they have to solve in the face to face escape room). 

Once they’ve gathered the answers, they can tick another box and a quiz/test is made available to them, they put the answers to the various puzzles into the test and this is automarked (see the quiz section below for more information) when they get all the answers correct another piece of content is released which could be another set of puzzles and another test, or a link to another place such as a Blackboard Collaborate room where you are waiting to greet the finishers, or a Padlet where they post their team name and time. 

You can release different content/puzzles to different groups of students (see more about setting up groups below), but ultimately lead them all to the same final location or submission point (e.g. Padlet). 

You can also release content at specific times, to the escape room could become live at a specific time so you know no one can access it early. 

For more information about the different criteria and how to set them up see our guide on the digital handbook. 

You may choose to set your escape room up for students to complete individually, but you may want to use it as an ice breaker or team building activity, in which case you’ll want to use the Blackboard Group tool, where you can randomly assign students to groups, let them sign up to specific groups or you can manually add them (this might work well if you already know your students and want to mix the abilities/friendship groups). 

Using groups for the escape room means you can give the students a specific space to work collaboratively and you can give them access to their own Blackboard Collaborate meeting space where they can see each other to work through the activities. 

Using groups also means you can use adaptive release to release content to just that group, so you can have different puzzles or activities for each group. 

The Blackboard assignment tool also has a group submission option, which means that one student from the group could upload something at the end of the escape room, on behalf of all the students. You would only need to mark it once and all students would receive feedback. 

These features would be useful if students will be doing group projects in the future and you want to introduce these different elements they’ll be using. 

You could use the feedback feature of the quiz to provide feedback after every answer they’ve submitted correctly and this leads to another puzzle, e.g. letters to spell out a word, or words to rearrange into another clue. 

You could also just have feedback once they’ve scored 100% that has a link to another place they need to go, e.g. another Blackboard Collaborate room, a Teams meeting/site or a Padlet. 

There are a range of question types that would be interesting to explore for the escape room including: 

HotSpot – students are presented with an image and select a particular area as the answer. 

Multiple Choice questions – with Multiple Choice questions, students select one correct answer from several choices. 

Multiple Answer Questions – Multiple Answer questions allow students to choose more than one answer. Use this type of question when more than one answer is correct. 

Fill in the blank questions – A Fill in the Blank question consists of a phrase, sentence, or paragraph with a blank space where a student provides the missing word or words. The maximum number of answers you can provide for a blank is 100. Use Fill in Multiple Blanks questions to create a question with multiple answers. 

Other questions types are available and can be explored in more detail here.

For further information of how to set up tests see our digital practice handbook 

1. Click the ‘File’ tab.
2. Click ‘Info’.
3. Click ‘Protect Document’ and then click ‘Encrypt with Password’.
4. In the Encrypt Document box, type a password, and then click ‘OK’.
5. In the  ‘Confirm Password’ box, type the password again, and then click ‘OK’.

1. Open the document that you want to add a password to.
2. On the ‘Word’ menu, click on ‘Preferences’.
3. Under ‘Personal Settings’, click ‘Security’.
4. In the ‘Password’ dialog box, type the password again and then click ‘OK’.

Question 1 asks the user to solve a puzzle and input the answer.

If a user gets it correct, they go to question 2, they get it wrong they can keep trying question 1. 

Question 2 gives a link to information that users need to assimilate to create a code, they can also input the code on question 2. If a user gets it correct, they go to question 3, if they get it wrong they can keep trying question 2. 

and so on until the end of the escape room.