Our first Beyond Multiple Choice: Nine Ways to Leverage Technology for Better Assessments Web seminar met with an enthusiastic response: it filled up almost instantly! So we are offering the same seminar again on Wednesday, December 16th, at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.

Assessments play a vital role in measuring people’s knowledge, skills and attitudes. They also help organizations improve performance, manage workforce competencies, and ensure regulatory compliance. How can you create and assessments that produce appropriate, actionable results? What can you do to ensure the quality of questions and the security of assessments all the way from authoring and scheduling to administration, reporting, and analysis? How can you make the best use of online authoring, reporting, analytical, and security tools? These and many other questions will be addressed in this free, hour-long session, which will include opportunities for you to ask questions of your own.

We welcome you to learn more about this Webinar and register online.

We decided at our last U.S. Users Conference in Memphis that it would be good to set aside a special place for attendees to meet with our support technicians one-on-one. Thus was born Tech Central, which was such a hit that it’s become a regular part of our conferences.

As we get ready for our 2010 Users Conference in Miami next March, I asked Ed Bell, our technical services manager, a few questions about this recent addition:

What’s Tech Central? Tech Central allows customers at our Users Conferences to meet one-on-one with the technicians. We sit down with them for 20 minutes or half an hour and work through issues we would normally talk about on the phone. Tech Central gives us a dedicated space for meeting with people. Now they know exactly where to find us instead of hoping they’ll be able to find us in passing.

How did customers respond to the first Tech Central in Memphis? You couldn’t ask for a better response. The customers could see that we really cared. The first day was sparsely attended, but once word spread we got more and more visitors. Some of them would check in with their office after visiting us and then come back again with follow-up questions. About three-fourths of the people who attended the conference came to see us. Tech Central was such a hit that we took it to the European Users Conference in England this fall.

How was Tech Central for Techs? It was hectic because we had so many people coming through, but we thought it was great! Sometimes people were queued up because it was so popular. Luckily we had a really large space with WIFI, so people could email while they waited. What made it so wonderful for us was that it gave us a chance to really connect with our customers as people.  That face-to-face contact makes a big difference in our relationships with customers. When they call us on the phone, we know who they are!

What are you looking forward to most about the next Users Conference? Reconnecting with people I’ve met in the past! I enjoy seeing customers at Breakfast Briefings and our conferences. That personal bond you build from being with people is wonderful. I also look forward to seeing the customers’ reactions to the new features in Questionmark Perception,  and I always like hearing customers’ success stories and seeing how enthusiastic they are. People generally call tech support when they have a problem, and it’s our job to take care of that problem, so hearing about successes does us a lot of good! And those of us who attend the conference share those success stories with our colleagues, which gives them a boost, too.  I can’t wait for 2010!

If you can’t wait either, here’s a gentle reminder that earlybird-registration ends December 4th.

You can learn more about the 2010 Questionmark Users Conference at www.questionmark.com/go/conference.

Posted by Steve Lay

Last month I wrote about our new Community Edition program under which we’ll be releasing selected integration products as free-to-download Community Editions distributed under open source licenses.

Although this program represents an exciting new way to involve the development community, Questionmark is no stranger to working with open source. Moodle is a popular learning management system that is developed by an active community of open source developers. Questionmark has always distributed its connector products for Moodle under a similar open source license, so it is no surprise that our new connector for Moodle 1.9 is available as a Community Edition.

The connector is written in the widely-used PHP system used by Moodle itself and uses QMWISe (Questionmark Web Integrated Services Environment) and PIP (Perception Integration Protocol) to allow Perception tests to be included as activities directly within Moodle courses.

You can find our more information about the connector and the development project behind the Community Edition from our new developer site: developer.questionmark.com. On the site, you’ll find information about our Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and all of our Community Edition projects. The Community Edition Moodle Connector page on the development site also links to the development project, which is hosted on the popular SourceForge system where you can download the latest version and even browse the code!

And finally, we’ve used Moodle as a development platform for the developer site itself, which means that we can demonstrate the connector working directly from the site. Look for the “Try It Out!” section on the Community Edition Moodle Connector page and see if you can answer my quick quiz on the main features of our Community Edition release program.

The hits keep coming. This month we have improved the look and feel of Questionmark Live with new buttons and improved Question Set sharing. Now when you create one shared question set, you can create another with the same shared permissions. You can also invite someone to join Questionmark Live via a shared question set or stop sharing a particular question set.

These new features are sure to make it easier for you to work collaboratively with your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and they’ll help you set up multiple question sets (topics) for item writing workshops. 

Watch the short video below to see how easy it is to create a new question set with sharing already set up!

Just over six months ago we announced Questionmark Live at the Questionmark Users Conference in Memphis.Since then, there have been 25,000 questions created using this new browser-based tool.  That sounds great, doesn’t it! But I was surprised to meet a number of customers at our Breakfast Briefings and User Group Meetings who had not yet seen this easy way to author questions. So I’d like to turn back the clock and re-announce the availability of Questionmark Live, which  all of our Software Support Plan customers can use free of charge.

Anyone you want questions from can have unlimited access to this tool. There’s nothing to download. They can just start creating questions sets on a desired theme  or topic, using seven different question formats. The questions can utilize multimedia, links and choice-based feedback.

Do you utilize workflows that involve SMEs, instructional designers and editors? Questionmark Live offers a great way to help people work together. Users can share their question sets with each other for true collaboration. Every question created and edited has a full revision history that can be used to compare revisions and roll back to previous versions.

If you haven’t taken a look at this exciting and dynamic tool, just click here to get started. If you would like a demonstration, please email customercare@questionmark.com to set one up!

The Questionmark Live team has done it again! We have continually released new features to help you author questions. One of the latest allows you to import questions from a .csv file. We have provided a template with examples that will help you and your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) create questions offline and then import them into Questionmark Live. Log into Questionmark Live and read the Knowledge Base article on importing external questions into Questionmark Live.

Download the template and give it a try.

(Questionmark Live is available free to Questionmark Software Support Plan customers, but anyone can try it out! Email customercare@questionmark.com to set up a trial account.)

Posted by Joan Phaup

We are looking forward eagerly to the Questionmark 2010 Users Conference set for March 14 – 17 in Miami. One of the many conference highlights will be a keynote by Dr. David Metcalf, a senior researcher at the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Simulation and Training. David, who is also an online faculty member at Walden University, explores leading edge innovations in learning and has authored several recent works including mLearning: Mobile Learning and Performance. His keynote address about Assessments on the Move: Mobility, Mashups and More will examine key trends, design techniques, and technologies that are emerging to meet the assessment challenges and changes of today and tomorrow.

Questionmark customers will play important roles in the conference program, too! So now’s the time to answer our call for proposals for case studies and peer discussions. Conference details and registration (special early-bird rate available until December 4th) are available at http://www.questionmark.com/go/conference.

As readers of this blog will know, QMWISe is the name given to the set of web-services provided by Questionmark for integrating third-party applications with the Perception assessment management system. Used in conjunction with the Perception Integration Protocol (PIP), QMWISe is the starting point for developing connectors that integrate Perception with other applications like learning management systems.

The scope of QMWISe has grown over the years as John Kleeman reported in “Seven years of web services for easier integration”.  With over 100 methods to choose from, knowing which methods are best for your integration project can be a challenge.

Developers often work best by copying real examples of an interface in action.  It makes perfect sense for us to release the code for the connectors we develop ourselves in source code form to help supplement the simpler code examples available in the reference guide.

So I’m pleased to announce that we now have a new connector to integrate Perception with Blackboard Learn 9 and that this connector is available as a Community Edition under an open source license. The connector is a Blackboard building block and uses QMWISe and PIP to allow Perception tests to be scheduled within Blackboard courses.

The motto of the open source community is “release early, release often” and we’re capturing that spirit with the concept of a Community Edition.  A Community Edition is an important milestone on the way to developing full support for an integration product, however, it doesn’t represent supported software itself!  The Community Editions are aimed at a more technical audience who want to test out the latest version of the software before it is available as a supported release from the Questionmark website. We’ll be making updated versions of Community Edition software available on a regular basis as the development projects that underpin them progress.

The new Blackboard connector is not just available free of charge under an open source license. We’re also opening up the development process itself by hosting the project at OSCELOT, a community of developers dedicated to creating and maintaining open source software in the e-Learning community.  You can see how the project is progressing and download the latest version yourself from the Blackboard Connector page on our new developer support site.

And we’re not going to stop at Blackboard!  Look out for Community Editions of other integration connectors coming soon….

The HR-XML Consortium is an independent organization that develops standard XML specifications to allow easier communication between human resources-related (“HR”) systems. HR-XML specifications tend to be short and to the point and easy and practical to develop for, so HR-XML has got a lot of traction over the years as a good vehicle for communication between different HR software systems. Questionmark is pleased to be a member of HR-XML.

Happy Birthday to HR-XML! HR-XML is celebrating its 10th anniversary on 2nd October at a luncheon at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago.

Questionmark has supported HR-XML in Questionmark Perception since 2005 and been certified by HR-XML to validate our conformance. Our support consists of providing a web services API within QMWISe that exports a Questionmark assessment result in HR-XML format. This allows other systems that can read HR-XML to easily process assessment results.

The example piece of Perception HR-XML output below shows that Jane Smith has taken a Microsoft Office Skills Test and passed it with a score of 85%. The XML also includes her topic scores, the date she took the test and the Questionmark result ID in case more information is needed. It’s practical, short and can be read by a person as well as by a computer.

HR-XML Consortium certification specialists validate the structure and meaning of sample data in order to provide a certification. Information about certification and a list of certified vendors like Questionmark is available at http://www.hrcertify.org/ Certified organizations need to re-certify every two years to ensure software still meets the standard.

I’m pleased to let you know that Questionmark has just completed its re-certification (see here for details). I’d encourage anyone looking for a simple assessment results exchange format to look at HR-XML because it’s simple, practical … and of course Questionmark supports it.