I set about entering some questions in Rogo today which will form the basis of a two part test for school children, testing, from an experimental psychology perspective, their understanding of grammar.
As this was my first foray in to creating a paper, I went at it by using the Rogo documentation – and fell at the second hurdle.
I began by opening “Help and Support” and read with interest the Getting Started with Formative Quizzes and with Summative Exams. Emboldened, I clicked on the link “Making a New Paper” on the latter page – and got a 404 (it does actually work as a link from the Formative Quizzes page though).
In any event, it was good that I applied to Jon because it turned out that I needed to create a complete hierarchy of Faculty, School, Course and Module before I could get into the paper. Once that was created, I set to work on the paper itself and that went swimmingly. I was able to choose between Matrix and Dichotmous questions for what I wanted; I decided I wanted the flexibility of using my own labels and went with the Matrix.
This was very straightforward – my main difficulty was that the text boxes for entering options are rather small. That wasn’t too much of a problem as I was cutting and pasting, but I think that I would find it very frustrating if I was inputting text and was only able to see approximately 11 characters at a time.
I was amused to discover a mis-placed apostrophe as I was entering the questions – and in a test on grammar too!
And then, as I checked the test, I noticed the sign off message:
NOTE: Please complete all questions before clicking ‘Finish’, you will not be able to go back.
We need to get that weak comma changed, I think. I’d like to see a conjunction added so that it reads:
NOTE: Please complete all questions before clicking ‘Finish’, as you will not be able to go back.
Yes, I am being pedantic, I’m afraid. Comes of being an ex-English teacher.
One thing that is clear to me as a user – Rogo is a system that stands on its own merits. For me, conceptualising in terms of “Element A is similar to Element Y in Perception” is not really valid, and just holds me back. I think I need to explore Rogo as an entity rather than as a comparison if its full power is to be understood!