During the recent Questionmark European Users Conference in Manchester, Stefanie Moerbeek, Senior Coordinator for Examination Development at EXIN, and Greg Pope, Questionmark’s Analytics and Psychometrics Manager, facilitated a best practice session that gave delegates the opportunity to participate in a peer discussion on Hot Topics in the Assessment Industry.

Stefanie and Greg join me in this podcast to share the outcomes of this session and provide an overview of topics such as beta testing questions, using randomization within examinations and dealing with intellectual property theft of exams.

What’s the most effective way for you to organize test items? Should you stick with topic-based organization? Or would it be more useful to organize by objectives? Lynn Duffield of Verizon Business discusses this dilemma in our latest podcast.

The University of Bradford has recently developed an innovative e-assessment facility, using cutting-edge thin client technology to provide a 100-seat room dedicated primarily to summative assessment. The room provides enhanced security features for online assessment and has been used for the first time in 2009 with considerable success. The room’s flexible design maximises its usage by allowing for formative testing, diagnostic testing and general teaching.

John Dermo is the e-Assessment Advisor at the University of Bradford.  In this podcast he explains the technology behind this unique setup and talks about the benefits and challenges in using this room. John Dermo will also be presenting a session at the 2009 European Users Conference, where he will go into more detail about the project.

Posted by Joan Phaup

End-of-course tests taken by more  than 100,000 students per year give the Arkansas Department of Career Education enormous amounts of data to process. Managing and reporting on that data effectively is essential not only for promoting classroom improvement and measuring student performance but also for reporting to government regulatory agencies and acquiring federal Perkins funding.

In this podcast, Karen Chisholm and Keith Peterson from the department’s Office of Assessment and Curriculum explain how they administer tests to so many students, determine what data is actionable and then disseminate the right data to the right people in the right form–all of which help career and technical education in the state keep pace with the needs of industry.

Listen to our conversation:

Posted by Joan Phaup

Online assessments  are used in many different way at Sanlam Personal Finance in South Africa. The company uses Questionmark Perception to test competencies and product knowledge. Assessments also play an important role in compliance. And in keeping with the company’s goal of engendering a high-performance culture, they are used on an ongoing basis to support learning. 

Because Sanlam uses online assessments so extensively, my recent conversation with Sanlam Training Technology Consultant Mark Julius covered a wide array of topics. We spoke about how his organization uses graphics and animations to simulate on-the-job situations during assessments. We also talked about the special challenges of operating in countries with varying levels of internet connectivity and the ever-expanding importance of proving compliance with government regulations.

You can learn more by reading our case study about Sanlam and their use of Perception, which they use together with the SAP Human Resources and Learning Management System.

Posted by Joan Phaup

Fox Valley Technical College makes a special effort to help faculty — including those with little or no technological expertise — make the transition to online quizzes and tests. The college’s training team provides classroom, online and blended learning options for faculty. In today’s podcast, Fox Valley System Administrator Vicki Sahr gives practical tips for helping faculty embrace online testing. Vicki tells a favorite success story about an anatomy instructor who was reluctant to leave paper behind despite students’ eager requests for online tests. Listen to the podcast to find out what happened!

I learned something else from talking with Vicki: among the many Fox Valley departments that use online testing is the college’s Criminal Justice Division, which provides training and technical assistance for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other law enforcement programs.

Dr.  Will Thalheimer of Work-Learning Research spoke with me recently about the role feedback plays in assessments and how it can be used to help learners.

Our conversation touches on the basics of using feedback effectively; if you want to learn more about this subject I recommend you check out Will’s research-to-practice paper: Providing Learners with Feedback. The paper examines the latest research on this complex topic and provides practical recommendations. You can find it in the Work-Learning Research Catalog or Questionmark’s white paper list.

So here’s Will! I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Posted by Joan Phaup

I chatted with Adam Zaller from Services University of NCR during the Questionmark 2009 Users Conference. Adam told me about the university’s global skills-based certification program for customer engineers who repair equipment such as ATMs in more than 45 countries. From day one, the most experienced engineers have helped design and build the program. That includes helping to provide test content.

Listen in on our conversation to find out more.

Posted By Sarah Elkins

David Lewis of Glamorgan University has extensive experience with Questionmark Perception. I spoke with him recently about the large scale implementation he has been working on at Glamorgan, where they use Questionmark for formative assessment, summative assessment and module evaluation. David also spoke about the training programs that have been developed within the University, the collaboration with other higher education institutions in Wales, and provided some great advice for anyone working with online assessments.