Posted by Julie Delazyn

Social networking, wikis, blogs, portals and collaboration tools play an increasingly important role, offering powerful ways to increase participation and sustain momentum in learning. Enterprise portal applications such as Microsoft SharePoint offer content management and facilitate information sharing across boundaries.

According to Bill Finegan, Vice President of Enterprise Technology Solutions at GP Strategies Corporation, the “portalization” of learning and development enables workers to gain the knowledge and skills they need to succeed, using technologies they engage with every day. How can tools like these fit in with your organization’s learning needs? And how can you make them work effectively together?

Bill answered these and other questions during a presentation called Get to the Point! Leverage SharePoint to meet your Learning and Development Needs at the 2013 Questionmark Users Conference,

Now available on SlideShare, this presentation explores the elements of a dynamic learning ecosystem and explains out how to combine SharePoint, Questionmark and other technologies to provide a learning environment suitable for today’s workers, This is just one example of what people learn about at our Users Conferences. Registration is already open for the 2014 Users Conference March 4 – 7 at the Grand Hyatt on the beautiful Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas. Plan to be there!

Posted by Julie Delazyn

How can you be sure that someone taking an online exam away from a testing center or classroom is adhering to the guidelines put in place by your instructional staff?

This SlideShare presentation will demonstrate how instructors can prevent or catch cheating and ensure a secure environment for employees or students taking tests in their homes, offices and other locations.

The slides are from a Best Practices sessions at the 2013 Questionmark Users Conference: Don Kassner of ProctorU discussed strategies for reducing incidents of dishonesty online, and Maureen Woodruff of Thomas Edison State College explained how online proctoring enables the college to administer tests securely to thousands of online learners.

This presentation offers a glimpse into the kind of discussions and sessions you can find at our Users Conferences. Registration is already open for the 2014 Users Conference March 4 – 7 at the Grand Hyatt on the beautiful Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas. Discounts are available for groups and early registrants. Sign up soon and plan to be there!

Posted by Brian McNamara

Remember what it was like to take a test or exam on paper? One of the benefits was that participants typically had the option of making marks on a test paper or test booklet to help them focus on certain key passages or terms – or perhaps to cross out certain choices as they worked on finding a correct answer.

As a test author or administrator, you might want to – or indeed be required to – provide this kind of flexibility during an exam.

Fortunately, you don’t have to sacrifice this flexibility when delivering your assessments online. New functionality being introduced to Questionmark OnDemand users enables them to configure their assessments to allow participants to:

1. Highlight terms or passages within a question stimulus
2. Make strike-through marks to visually eliminate distractors.

Highlight and strike-through is a great way to empower participants to create visual cues within items to help them focus on key content and eliminate distractors as they work to answer a given question.

Want to see it in action? Check out the video below!

We have plenty of resources available to you. “How-to” videos and brief presentations about best practices, will give you valuable pointers about authoring, delivery and integration in our Learning Cafe. We also share presentations and videos on our SlideShare page.

Posted by Julie Delazyn

Writing high-quality test items is difficult, but writing questions that go beyond checking knowledge is even more complex.

James Parry, E-Testing Manager at the U.S. Coast Guard Training Center in Yorktown, Virginia, offered some valuable tips on advanced test item construction during a peer discussion at this year’s Questionmark Users Conference.

The PowerPoints from this session will help you distinguish among three levels of test items:

• Low-complexity – requiring knowledge of single facts
• Medium-complexity – requiring test takers to know or derive multiple facts
• High-complexity – requiring test takers to analyze and evaluate multiple facts to solve problems (often presented as scenarios)

The slides relate these levels to Bloom’s Taxonomy and Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction and offer pointers for writing performance-based test items based on clear objectives.

Enjoy the presentation below, and save March 4 – 7 next year for the Questionmark 2014 Users Conference in San Antonio, Texas.

Posted by Julie Delazyn

Creating strong, defensible assessments is a frequent theme in this blog.

Most recently, Doug Peterson took readers step by step through a ten-part series of posts on Test Design and Delivery. Based on this series, he put together a presentation (now available on SlideShare) called Five Steps to Better Tests: Best Practices for Design and Delivery for the Questionmark Users Conference in March.

The presentation goes through each key step test creation process from planning the test, with tips like avoiding bias and stereotyping, to creating it and setting passing standards, delivering it while ensuring test security and finally, evaluating it using item-level data to improve item quality.

Enjoy the presentation below, and mark your calendar for the 2014 Questionmark Users Conference, March 4-7 in in San Antonio, Texas.

Posted by Julie Delazyn

I read and answer comments all the time from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ about the value of the presentations we post on our Questionmark SlideShare page as well as the ways in which they are being shared and used.

Presentations make up a huge part of the way thought leaders at Questionmark pass on all the great information that comes from our various white papers, research and case studies. As we enter the second quarter of the year, we’d like to highlight some of the most popular presentations we’ve featured on the blog.

5. Using the Angoff Method to Set Cut Scores (Alan Wheaton and Jim Parry, USCG)
4. Alignment, Impact and Measurement with the A-model (Bruce C. Aaron, Ametrico)
3. EATP- Using a blended delivery model to drive strategic success for SAP certification (Susan Martin and Ralf Kirchgaessner, SAP and John Kleeman, Questionmark)
2. Measuring Social Learning in SharePoint with Assessments (John Kleeman, Questionmark)
1. Assess to Comply: how else can you be sure that employees understand? (John Kleeman, Questionmark)

Feel free to comment, share and let us know in which ways these have helped you!