My usual role in working with assessment software is inputting questions and creating assessments, so my thoughts are going to reflect this.
Obviously, with any new piece of software there’s a few howls of “Why won’t it do this???” “How on earth do I do that?” I just have to say to myself … this too will pass. And Rogo seems to be – so far – a very intuitive system.
What I’m more concerned about is things that will slow my workflow, and I’ve hit a couple – one which resolved itself, and one which hasn’t yet …
1) The automatic numbering system works against the one that we have established over the last five years.
Rogo has the pattern of numbering question stems A, B, C, D etc and numbering options 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.
Our existing system numbers stems (i), (ii), (iii) etc and options A, B, C, D etc. Numerals are used on diagrams (as in “What is the shaded area at 3?”)
I’m not saying that our system is perfect but … it works. And more importantly, we have upwards of five thousand questions configured in that way.
It seems that we CAN turn off the numbers on options, but we haven’t yet found out if we can take off letters on stems.
2) In the past, to support students who need to take the exam in a paper-based form, and as a back-up in case the system goes down, we have evolved a template to do this. It’s a one click, load the template process; it automatically adds page breaks and replaces dropdown lists with paper-friendly boxes. Are we going to be able to do this in Rogo? Or will I go back to the pre-template system of making the changes to the html manually in Dreamweaver?
A third problem resolved itself beautifully … I regularly create a crib sheet with the correct answers for examiners to use to check the paper. In Perception, you need something in the answer boxes before it will share the answers with you (because of the way we have set up the system. I therefore have a little tool in Firefox that automatically fills in forms, and I was most disappointed that it didn’t work in Rogo – until Jon showed me that simply submitting the paper gave me a full set of answers – which is MUCH easier.
I should add that by the time 8it reaches the students, they will not be in this happy position …