Looking for testing software

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Permalink Reply by Tammy Moore on July 3, 2009 at 7:08am

I am not familiar with ClassMarker or TCExam. I know Moodle though and it should be useful for what you describe. You can use it 'out of the box' and do what you are aiming for as well as play around with the CSS or create a SCORM package to deliver the testing. It will be pretty easy to embed multimedia and graphics.

The test design 'out of the box' is pretty flexible allowing for multiple choice, T/F, numerical, computational, and short answer problems that the computer can fully self-score. You also have essay question types that are designed for manual scoring. The Moodle software is free but it will need to be hosted or placed on the companies own server of course.

Because of the math questions you will need to have, I recommend either installing one of the math editor add-ons (these are free too), designing some of the math questions to include some Flash math equation design (drag and drop), or work those to only pop up in conjunction with multiple choice instead of a short answer type of problems.

The rest of the comments are if you are thinking of going beyond the basic, built in quizzing capability built in to Moodle's quizzing tool.

Since you use Dreamweaver, you may be familiar with Captivate (another Adobe product). It is now offered as a stand alone product and within the educator's suite. Captivate within the Educator's Suite will output a SCORM package and has a built in quiz design system. It plays nice with Dreamweaver. It is really had to find anything on it at the Adobe website. I had bought the CS4 Web Premium at the time that the Educator's Suite was released and though I crawled all over the site trying to decide about the CS4, I didn't stumble upon the Educator's suite until 4 months after I bought the CS4 for my 64 bit Vista. I think the reason they don't push the Educator's Suite is because the current release of Captivate will not work on a Vista 64 (sound is all messed up) bit. It will work with 32 though. I do not think that there is a Mac version either, but I could be wrong. When they get Captivate up to speed to run on these major platforms it should be a really nice combination. I worked with the Educator's Suite as a trial. I would have bought it had it worked on my 64 bit processor. I found switching to another computer to do the Captivate parts then having to bring the files to my 64 to be frustrating and lose the advantages that the suite had in integrating Flash, Captivate, and other Adobe programs into a seamless whole.

There are a few free SCORM package creation tools out there. Exe is the main one I have heard about. Many course designers seem to like it. I have tried it twice without success myself though. It doesn't have a lot of documentation.

I have used Adobe Flash with Moodle successfully within Moodle; though, I have used it only as interactive multimedia or for animations. I have not tried to use it for assessments (to make anything that interacts with the grade book in Moodle). You would have to have Flash initiate, report to, and close in conjuction with Moodle's database/gradebook. That is why I was looking at the educator's suite with some interest. It had tools built in to create the SCORM that would have the database/grade book reporting built in.

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Permalink Reply by Tammy Moore on July 3, 2009 at 7:36am

Well, I can see hitting 'Add reply' as a save and assuming I would not get called away from the computer before the 15 minute's were up to proofread was a bad idea. LOL.

Other than the edits I wanted to make, I also wanted to get a link to the educator's suite I mentioned. I found the link and need to correct the name. It is eLearning Suite. the link is http://www.adobe.com/products/elearningsuite/

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Permalink Reply by Bill Pitts on July 4, 2009 at 3:32pm

Thanks for the response, Tammy. I've downloaded Moodle and will start exploring (read that as trying to figure it out!).

SCORM is something that I will need to get up to speed on. My only experience with education is my role as a student.

I appreciate the information about Captivate as well, however that is a Windows program and I use a Macintosh. There are comparable programs (Flash perhaps?) for the Mac platform so I'm sure I'll be covered.

Thanks again,
Bill

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Permalink Reply by C. Hutcheson on July 5, 2009 at 5:05pm

Hi Bill,
For ideas you might check out "Galileo" online testing~ it provides predictions about student success on state-mandated tests based on the collected student data. It is aligned with state standards and phenomenally powerful!
Clair

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Permalink Reply by David Kapuler on July 6, 2009 at 7:50am

I was going to suggest Moodle as well, but some other CMS that you might want to consider are Plone and Joomla both which offer users to login and take sample tests.

Plone - http://plone.org/
Extension - this is the extension you would need to download to enable test w/ questions... http://plone.org/http://plone.org/products/cmfquestions
Website - Here is an example of site made in Plone that I did for my old district... http://lions.dist57.org/

Joomla - http://www.joomla.org/
Website - http://karoumimassage.com/joomla/ here is a site I made for my friend's business

Drupal - http://drupal.org/

These are all web based, free, and built on PHP. They are very user friendly and all content can be modified plus you can download extensions/plugins to edit your site as you desire.

Hope this helps.

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