Posted by Julie Delazyn

If you’re following this blog, you will have noticed many presentations, conceptual videos, tutorials and demos about all sorts of assessment-related subjects.

Now you can access these resources all in one place: Questionmark’s new and improved Learning Café!

Learning Cafe includes more than three dozen videos, demonstrations and other resources about everything from assessment-related best practices to the use of Questionmark technologies.

Here are just a few examples of what you will find there:

Best Practices

• Assessments Through the Learning Process

Authoring

• Creating and Managing Questions

Delivery

• Auto-Sensing & Auto-Sizing Assessments

Integration

• Configuring a SharePoint Site to Embed Questionmark Perception

We will continue to add more resources, so keep checking back to see what’s new.

Posted by John Kleeman

Lots of people ask me how you can use assessments to measure the effectiveness of informal learning.  If people are learning at different times, in different ways and without structure, how do you know it’s happening? And how can you justify investment in social and informal learning initiatives?

The 70+20+10 model of learning is increasingly understood – that we learn 70% on-the-job, 20% from others and 10% from formal study. But as people invest in informal learning initiatives, a key question arises. How do you measure the impact? Are people learning? And more importantly, are they performing better?

In a presentation at the Learning Technologies conference in London in January, I suggested there are three areas in which to use assessments:

Did they like it?

You can use surveys to evaluate attitudes and reactions – either to specific initiatives or to the whole 70+20+10 initiative. Measuring reaction does not prove impact, but yields useful data. For example, surveys yielding consistently negative results could indicate initiatives are missing the mark.

You could also look at the Success Case Method, which lets you home in on individual examples of success to get early evidence of a learning programme’s impact. See here and here for my earlier blog posts on how to do this.

Of course, if you are using Questionmark technology, you can deliver such surveys embedded in blogs, wikis or other informal learning tools and also on mobile devices.

Did they learn it?

There is strong evidence for the use of formative quizzes to help direct learning, strengthen memory and engage learners. You can easily embed quizzes inside informal learning, e.g. side by side with videos or within blogs, wikis and SharePoint, to track use and understanding of content.

With informal learning, you also have the option of encouraging user-generated quizzes. These allow the author to structure, improve and explain his or her knowledge and engage and help the learner.

You can also use more formal quizzes and tests to measure knowledge and skills. And you can compare someone’s skills before and after learning, compare to a benchmark or compare against others.

Are they doing it?

Of course, in 70+20+10, people are learning in multiple places, at different times and in different ways. So measuring informal learning can be more difficult than measuring formal, planned learning.

But if you can measure a performance improvement, that is more directly useful than simply measuring learning. A great way of measuring performance is with observational assessments. This is described well in Jim Farrell’s recent post Observational assessments- measuring performance in a 70+20+10 world.

To see the Learning Technology presentation on SlideShare, click here. For more information on Questionmark technologies that can help you assess informal learning, see www.questionmark.com.

Posted by Julie Delazyn

The way we learn is changing. By allowing us to more easily share information and acquire knowledge, the Internet has made it easier to learn informally. Moving away from the traditional academic model, we are increasingly learning from each other and on the job.

Microsoft SharePoint’s popularity as a collaboration environment for everyday work tasks makes it a readily available environment for learning functions — an idea that fits in well with the 70+20+10 learning model. Assessments also fit in well with that model, and with SharePoint, too.

Many types of assessments can work well with SharePoint – everything from quizzes, diagnostic tests, knowledge checks and competency tests to surveys and course evaluations. No matter what the setting – a formal learning program, regulatory compliance, performance support or an employee/partner portal, perhaps – assessments have key roles to play.

How to include assessments in SharePoint?
•    Inbuilt SharePoint – functional for basic surveys
•    Custom web parts – write your own!
•    Embed Flash apps – possible for simple quizzes
•    Embed web apps – easy to do. (See how a Questionmark user has embedded a quiz to engage learners.)

If you would like to learn more about using assessments within SharePoint, you can check out this Questionmark presentation on SlideShare.

For more details, download the white paper Learning and Assessment on SharePoint or visit John Kleeman’s SharePoint and Assessment blog.

Microsoft SharePoint’s popularity as a collaboration environment for everyday work tasks makes it a readily available environment for learning functions — an idea that fits in well with the 70+20+10 learning model.

Questionmark Integration Product Owner Steve Lay points out the possibilities and challenges of integrating learning functions into an existing portal environment in a recent post on John Kleeman’s SharePoint and Assessment blog.

In that post, Integrating with SharePoint: Intranet to Internet, Steve identifies issues such as integrating identity and authentication between SharePoint and external systems, notes the progress being made toward using externally hosted tools together with SharePoint and offers some links for people interested in more details.

The post is well worth reading if you are interested in SharePoint integration. For insights on many other integration-related themes, check out Steve’s own blog.

Many Questionmark customers use SharePoint within their organization. Microsoft SharePoint is a fantastic tool that lets non-technical people create collaborative web sites, and SharePoint is a great system to deploy assessments in for learning, training and compliance.

One of the easiest ways to include an assessment inside SharePoint is as a knowledge check – you can easily put a Questionmark Perception assessment beside some learning content as in the screenshot.

Putting a knowledge check in a SharePoint page gives three benefits

• The learner can check he/she understands
• The learner gets retrieval practice to reinforce the learning
• As author, you can run reports to see which parts of the learning are understood or missed

In order to help people get the benefits of using assessments inside SharePoint, Questionmark have launched a new blog http://blog.sharepointlearn.com which focuses on SharePoint and assessment. This will allow us to run more detailed articles on SharePoint and assessments than the main blog can.

SharePoint is a lot easier to use than many people think. You don’t need administrative rights or programming skills to do most things. At the Questionmark Users Conference last week, I ran a session where people added an assessment in a sandbox site in just a few minutes. You can include an assessment inside SharePoint using the Page Viewer Web Part, which most people who can edit SharePoint pages have access to – if you want to give it a go, here are some instructions from the new blog.

Posted by Joan Phaup

Questionmark Chairman John Kleeman

We’re especially pleased to have Questionmark Founder and Chairman John Kleeman on board as one of our best practice presenters at this year’s Questionmark Users Conference. As the person who wrote the original Questionmark software, John has more than 20 years’ experience in the learning industry and has participated in several industry standards initiatives. Lately he has been turning his energies to interfacing with other thought leaders and understanding the dramatic changes that are taking place in how people learn and the increasingly important role assessment is playing within learning.

John’s conference presentation on Using Questionmark Perception to Make SharePoint an Effective Learning Platform will show how participants can use Questionmark assessments within SharePoint to measure and reinforce learning, using both products out of the box. Here’s a quick Q&A about his plans for that session:

Q: Could you talk a little about SharePoint and its growing role in learning, training and compliance?
A: The great thing about SharePoint is that it’s a really easy system for putting together websites, without needing programmers. If you want to put up learning material or training material it’s easy to do so with SharePoint. And at least half of companies and universities already have SharePoint, so it’s easy for people to make things happen quickly.  With the improvements in SharePoint 2010, in blogs and wikis, and with stronger version tracking making it more useful for compliance, there’s growing application of SharePoint in learning and training.

Q: How do you envision Questionmark enhancing learning for SharePoint users?
A: There’s a lot of evidence that people who answer questions after learning something tend to remember it better; that if you take a quiz then it gives you retrieval practice to stop you forgetting what you have learned. By embedding an assessment on a learning page you allow people to get retrieval practice, and you can also check their comprehension of what they have been read. They can check their own knowledge, and you can also look at the aggregate results to see how well people have understood something. If you see a question that people consistently get wrong, you can identify misconceptions and improve the content. This takes very little work, so putting Questionmark assessments on a page in SharePoint or other systems is a fantastic combination.

Q: How could Questionmark be used to measure social learning within SharePoint?
The majority of what people learn happens on the job and in learning from colleagues and mentors, not in formal learning. It’s social learning. SharePoint is so prevalent in many organizations that it’s a great way to share news and information or process documents. Putting a knowledge check on a page is a great way to see how much people are absorbing. Breaking up larger assessments into smaller chunks that relate to specific parts of a page is a great way to reinforce this kind of learning – just-in-time and just-enough assessments.  SharePoint is a set of building blocks that you can put together to help learning, and you can just mash in assessments to fit your needs.

Q: How easy is it for someone to incorporate a Questionmark assessment within SharePoint? What tools make this possible?
A: If you’ve got Questionmark Perception version 5, it’s really easy, because of the auto-sensing and auto-sizing capability. Perception can sense the size of the frame it’s running in and automatically fit an assessment into the space. You just use SharePoint to determine the size of the frame or window you want to use and put the Questionmark quiz into that space. SharePoint is an end user tool, so people can just configure SharePoint in a browser and put things together themselves.

Q: Have you come across any interesting examples of assessments being used with SharePoint?
A: I think a lot of people are finding that putting training programs into SharePoint saves them a lot of money. I found one example of a large company that had a training program that would have cost them $600,000 to provide face-to-face. In SharePoint it cost $45,000. It’s a very practical system to get something up and running within a few days.

Q: What do you expect participants  to gain from this session?
A:  I’d love participants to be able to go back to their organizations, find their SharePoint installation and start putting assessments into it. You don’t have to be a technical wizard to do this. It doesn’t require help from IT. It doesn’t require technical skills, you can just go do it.  Anyone who comes to the session, I promise they will know how to put an assessment into SharePoint.

Take advantage of the early-bird registration discount and save $100 by registering for the conference by January 21st.