Using QuizMaker as an Essay Assessment Tool

[Marcos]

I just bought your software...wow, it was really expensive !

I have some doubts. My first project is a self assessment quiz. I understand that Articulate products have more a "presentation" than a essay characteristic, meaning that it is more suited to quizzes that are taken once and sent away. However, my assessment is mostly comprised of essay questions, and some are long ones. Ideally, the user would be able to answer some questions, leave, think about them, come back at another time, edit questions if he wants, print and save the results, much as if he were working on a online text editor.

1) Is there a way for the user to resume the quiz after he left it? Does it depend on the LMS or can he do it in the web/CD delivery as well?

2) Is there a way for the user to go back and edit the answers he already responded to? I mean, he is in question 9 and he wants to edit question 4. Or does he have to end the whole quiz before changing an answer (and perhaps losing all the work)?

3) Can the user send an email with the results to himself, instead of the admin email?

4) Can the user print the results after the quiz is finished?

Thanks for the assistance. I tried hard to find answers in the forum before posting.

Marcos

[Jeanette]

Hello Marcos, and welcome to the forums!

[1) Is there a way for the user to resume the quiz after he left it? Does it depend on the LMS or can he do it in the web/CD delivery as well?

Quizmaker offers a resume feature that you can turn on by going to Player Templates>Edit>Navigation and marking the box that says "Prompt to resume on quiz restart." This sets a flash cookie so that when users access the quiz from a unique machine (or unique machine login, if they use a shared machine) and then they leave the quiz & come back later, they'll be asked whether they want to pick up where they left off. When deploying the quiz through an LMS, though, typically the LMS itself will do the work of remembering where the user was when they left, so if that's case you can also mark the box that says "When running in LMS, ignore Flash cookie."

2) Is there a way for the user to go back and edit the answers he already responded to? I mean, he is in question 9 and he wants to edit question 4. Or does he have to end the whole quiz before changing an answer (and perhaps losing all the work)?

If you set up your quiz so that users submit all their answers at once (rather than one at a time), then yes, users can go back and edit their answers before submitting them. To allow this, go to Player Templates>Edit>Navigation and mark the option "Submit all at once." A nice thing about this is that if you've also enabled the "resume" option mentioned above, then users won't lose their work if they leave the quiz and come back later. Their responses will still be there when they return to the quiz, and they can see/edit them if they want, before submitting.

3) Can the user send an email with the results to himself, instead of the admin email?

Currently Quizmaker enables you to specify one email address to which the results can be sent. It would make a great feature request, though, to enable users to specify their own email if they want to send the results to themselves.

4) Can the user print the results after the quiz is finished?

Yes, you can add a Print Results button to the results page that the user sees after all their answers are submitted. Here's a quick tutorial that shows how to set that up:
How to allow users to print their results from #Articulate Quizmaker '09

I hope that helps! Please let us know if you have more questions.

[Marcos]

Jeanette,
Thanks a lot for the throughout response.
Because I work with small projects, mostly with companies which do not have an internal LMS, the issue of keeping the data safe and available in a quiz is vital, especially when providing the quiz in a CD or USB drive form.
Ideally, Quizmaker should provide some sort of internal simple database solution so the results would be saved in some kind of file. I have seen many posts dealing with databases, but the solutions are still awkward and difficult. It would be great to see some solution where the user could have a small menu with "save/restore" your quiz options.

Cheers from Brazil

[@robkennedy3]

Hi Marcos,

Yes, having a small database would be cool. My only thought about that is that because you are dealing with source files converted into Flash, this would be a bit awkward and make for bigger files. For archival purposes, you could probably suggest your users/clients use a "print to pdf" solution so you don't have to store hard copies. That would allow the user to email themselves a pdf of the quiz result and also allow for storage of the results file by a department if necessary. Costwise, there are some free print to pdf such as PrimoPDF. If they are using Macs, then the Print to PDF is a built in option (yaaay Mac). Hopefully this helps.

Robert