The Rogo delivery system seems to be robust and, unlike the admin interface, free from bugs. It also seems fast, and initial load-testing has shown it to be capable of putting up with a reasonable number of students starting or finishing an assessment at the same time, although we have not tested this in a live environment. This is despite us running the system on a single, reasonably-spec’d, but not especially new, server.
One handy feature in the Rogo delivery system, that Perception does not have, is the Fire Alarm button – see https://learntech.medsci.ox.ac.uk/wordpress-blog/?p=15.
However, there are a number of things that are missing, compared with Perception: Auto-save, timed assessments, secure browser.
Auto-save
Rogo is not able to auto-save assessments, e.g. every 5 minutes. It does save when a user moves to another screen (and when the fire alarm button is clicked) but since we prefer to run our exams as a single, scrollable screen containing all of the questions, this is not particularly helpful. However, since the functions are there for saving the current status of an exam while the exam is continuing, it would proably not be a big step to write an AJAX-based auto-save function.
Timed Assessments
Assessments in Rogo are never timed and so do not autosubmit when the time is up. The assessments we have run in Perception have traditionally been timed, so that each user’s time only begins when they enter the assessment page, and the assessment automatically submits when their time runs out. There is also a timer on the page, so the student can see exactly how much time they have left, as this would not be the same for all students. However, we have recently been leaning increasingly towards running untimed assessments, mainly due to the problems of disaster recovery with a timed assessment. For example, if a fire alarm were to go off, it would not be possible to pause the timer and allow students to carry on from where they left off. Therefore, the lack of timed assessments is unlikely to be a major issue, as we were heading in this direction anyway. Nonetheless, it would be good to have the option!
Secure Browser
Unlike Perception, Rogo does not have built in secure browser support. However, there are free secure browsers out there that can be used instead, e.g. Safe Exam Browser – http://safeexambrowser.org. We might cover this more fully at a later date when we’ve done more testing with it. Update: Now covered in this post
