Articulate Quizmaker 09 - Review

It’s very rare that a new piece of authoring software lives up to the hype written by the publisher’s Marketing and PR teams. But Articulate’s QuizMaker 09, designed to be an easy to use test and question development and delivery system, does just what it says on the tin.

Quizmaker is part of the Articulate suite of rapid e-learning development tools and if used alongside the company’s Presenter and Engage packages it can be used to make effective and interactive e-learning materials.

Question Types in Quizmaker 09

Quizmaker can be used by just about anybody to develop questions, tests and surveys. It offers most of the question types that you might ever want use in simple, tutorial based e-learning.

These include:

• Multiple Choice
• Multiple Choice with multiple responses
• Fill in the blank (cloze texts)
• Word Bank
• Matching – Drag and drop
• Matching – Drop down
• Sequencing – Drag and Drop
• Sequencing – Drop Down
• Numeric input
• Hotspot

The user’s answers can be given a score, so you can create graded tests and specify your own pass/fail marks. A summary screen at the end of a test informs the user of their score and whether or not they have passed – these marks can be passed to a VLE/LMS as Quizmaker files can be output as SCORM objects.

Quizmaker allows you to write and present feedback messages as text or audio, but only to one correct and all incorrect answers. This is great for summative tests, but not so good for formative work, where I’d prefer to be able to provide specific feedback to each incorrect answer. The package does, however, enable you to use branching on correct/incorrect answers.


Quizmaker – Some Advantages

• You can create usable materials very quickly. It’s easy to create new questions and tests as Quizmaker just uses three screens to guide you through the creation process. You can create and edit using a Form View – if you want to create something more bespoke you can use the Slide View and add your own graphics, movies and so on.
• Any graphics you import can be sized and edited on the fly, including effect such as mirroring or framing.
• With some creative thought you could create a short e-learning tutorial in Quizmaker – you can add blank slides as you wish. You wouldn’t be able to do anything too sophisticated, but for less than 300 GBP you do have a mini authoring system.
• Test and Question attributes are easy to change – changing the pass/fail mark is easy.
• Properties and delivery environments can be changed (e.g. web to CD version).
• Questions can be randomised
• Question can be imported from other tests
• Packaging into SCORM objects is easy.
• You can try before you buy by downloading a 30 day trial version.
• The Articulate Company offers a lot of support in the form of a blog and a useful handbook on e-learning.

Quizmaker – Some Disadvantages

• You can feedback to the correct answer, but you can’t write specific feedback for each expected incorrect answer.
• Like other Articulate products, you need to do a lot of work if you don’t want your material looking like just another Articulate solution.
• Scores are presented at the end of a test, so you can’t see how you are doing during a test.

Would I Use Quizmaker?

Yes. It does most of what I’d want a test generation system to do at an affordable price.