eLearning is all about two core activities: giving learners access to training content and testing their familiarity with it. The rest (managing course content, handling user accounts, reading reports) is mostly dressing (and administrative minutiae) on top of these two things.
eSoft Skills LMS has been designed to minimize the non-essential parts and make the core functionality –training content delivery and testing– as intuitive and powerful as possible.
In this post, we’ll have a look at Tests and Quizzes in eSoft Skills LMS, an important mega-feature set.
A Question Of Testing
A Test in eSoft Skills LMS (as in real life, come to think of it), is defined as a series of Questions.
And we say “Questions”, with a capital Q, because we’re talking about the eSoft Skills LMS-native Question entities. See, questions in eSoft Skills LMS are not just some text asking something, but smart objects that keep track of the correct answer, and can be displayed to the user in several different formats.
The available Question types include:
Multiple Choice
This is perhaps the most common question type ― the one in which the learner has to pick one (or more) entries from a list of possible answers.
Fill The Gap
Another classic Question type that is also used in traditional schoolbooks, “Fill The Gap” asks the learner to, well, fill in one or more missing words to complete the question’s text.
Drag And Drop
For this style of Question, the learner has to drag one item to its corresponding item on the other side, thus matching Question and Answer.
Ordering
For subjects where the ranking/order is important (e.g. “Which are Europe’s largest cities?”), an Ordering question has learners sort several items in the correct order.
Free Text
The learner can type a free-form answer to the question. Unlikely all conventional classroom examinations, Free Text questions in eSoft Skills LMS are also graded automatically, with the use of keywords.
Randomized
Not exactly a Question type per se, this feature allows instructors to create a pool of questions and answers from which eSoft Skills LMS can draw a randomized (for each learner) set of questions when creating a test.
Aside from writing your own questions, you can also use already defined questions (from any course) in the “Select questions” section, and even import questions in the popular GIFT and AIKEN formats.