Having been tied to Perception for many years, it is refreshing to be able to test out Rogo, which, although still in it’s infancy, has the potential to be a viable alternative. While we have come across some issues, there are also a good number of things that it does better than Perception (and I expect there are plenty more to come):
- Quicker, simpler, less clunky, more intuitive – Rogo just feels like a nicer, less 90’s system to work with
- Version history for questions – it will be extremely useful to be able to look back at how a question has changed and developed. In Perception, we use a complex system of question naming to keep track of major versions of a question, but this is far from ideal.
- Drag and drop question ordering
- Easy duplication of exams, with options to copy the questions or just link to the same set of questions
- Fire Alarm/Exit button in exam mode – students can click this button to if there is a fire alarm or other problem during an exam and it basically just shows a blank screen, so that students can be stopped and started together, without anyone seeing anyone else’s screen while they leave the room, or benefiting from seeing the exam for an extra amount of time. Assessments are not timed, and do not auto-submit, so this is not used to stop the timer.
- Flexible feedback settings
Perhaps the most important benefit of Rogo though is that it is OSS (Open Source Software) and written in PHP, which is where our skills primarily lie. Therefore, when there are things that don’t work as we would like, we can change them. Whereas with Perception, we generally just have to live with them and pay for the pleasure!