Getting Started
Below are some options for instructors interested in creating an online quiz or assessment. In general, we recommend that instructors first work with these tools by using them to create “low-stakes” review exercises, practice tests and self-assessments. It’s important to feel comfortable with a quiz/exam tool before administering a “high-stakes” (graded) test electronically. You’ll also need to reserve a computer classroom and plan the administration of the exam carefully. You are encouraged to consult with Ted Liu, Foreign Lanugage Instructional Technology Coordinator (FLITC), or with your departmental Instructional Technology Consultant if you need assistance.
Some Quiz/Exam Tools:
1) Ecampus Quiz Tool: Ecampus comes with its own quiz/survey tool which can be used to create graded or ungraded quizzes/assessments using questions with text and image prompts, and offering multiple-choice, true-false, short-answer, and other question formats. The same tool can also be used to create surveys with the option of anonymous responses. Ecampus quizzes and surveys can be built in advance, and released to students in a selected time-frame, or made ongoingly available for student self-assessment. To add the Quiz Tool to Ecampus course websites, anyone with ‘designer’ access can go to Control Panel-->Add Page or Tool-->Quiz Tool. For WebCT's instructions on how to use this tool, click here. If you’d like to consult with someone or need help with incorporating this tool into Ecampus, please consult the Instructional Technology Consultant (ITC) assigned to your department.
2) Foreign Language/Wimba: Wimba is a suite of web-based communications tools as well as an Oral Assessment Builder. Instructors and students can communicate using Voice Email, Voice Discussion Boards, and Voice Direct (a voice chat tool). With the Oral Assessment Builder, instructors can create online oral exercises and assessments for students to take, as well as give oral feedback to students. For more information about Wimba and the Foreign Language ITC, click here.
3) Test Pilot: Test Pilot is a web-based application that allows instructors to author tests, surveys, quizzes, and administer them over the Internet. Test Pilot does not require instructors to have any programming skills or knowledge of HTML, has the option of computer-adaptive testing, and supports multimedia, which is particularly useful for language testing. Students need only an Internet connection and a web browser. We are piloting the use of Test Pilot in the authoring and administration of Italian Placement Exams through Center for Digital Humanities' Projects. For a review of Test Pilot by the Language Learning and Technology Journal, click here.
4) Hot Potatoes: A downloadable lesson construction tool to build a teaching website; includes crosswords, gap-fills, cloze tests, matching, multiple choice and jumbled exercises. Free for educators at publicly funded institutions. Hot Potatoes is especially well suited for creating self-assessments, since scores can only be emailed to the instructor, but cannot be “stored” online for future retrieval. Quizzes built with Hot Potatoes can be sequenced, and are also easily incorporated into any existing web/html page. Support for any Unicode character set makes Hot Potatoes a good choice for foreign-language assessments as well. Depending on your needs, Hot Potatoes can be a better choice than the WebCT quiz tool. Click here for Hot Potatoes info and download.
Contributed by tl. Last updated February 27, 2006 by mg