Quiz making and e-learning for college and university staff

What we can do for you: college faculty

Your needs

Testing and marking takes up an inordinate amount of time for college and university educators. Essentially it is dead, uncreative, unproductive time. Teaching and research is the creative heart of an academic's life. Testing and marking is a drain on this. The larger a class, the worse this situation can become.

Computer-based training and assessment methods can relieve part of this burden. If you turn your mid-terms tests, for example, into an electronic test with automated marking, even a class with 100 students or more becomes a doddle to deal with. If you add to that the possibility of training modules (test modules released before testing for the student to spend as much time on as they like), weaker students can be motivated by the interactive environment and are more likely to pass the course, raising your success rates and reducing the burden of retakes.

The basics

We provide a series of easily-installed Windows applications to help you with training and testing.

The Qedoc Quiz Player: students install this free programme on their computers to run the modules you create. The Player has been specially designed to maximize learning motivation. Learn more...
The Qedoc Quiz Maker: this is where you create interactive educational modules to fit in with your courses. The Quiz Maker has been designed to turn your ideas into professional-looking, interactive learning games with a minimum of time and effort. Learn more...
The Qedoc Marker: shortly to be released.

Independence of college administration

A lot of colleges offer what are called "Learning Management Systems" (or similar). These can have disadvantages, such as: being incredibly expensive, locking you in to a specific set of functions, administration-centered and administration-heavy, making your test development dependent on your IT department.

If you go with the Qedoc system, it frees you up from this.

No server or network installation required.
The only necessary software are simple Windows applications which any student or professor can install on a computer without assistance.
Any laptop is sufficient, even when you are away at a conference or visiting another college. Your students can also use training material away from college.
No-cost route means independence of budgetting and financial controls.
Training is not needed.

Free or commercial path?

The Qedoc Quiz Player is free anyway - but you also need a copy of the Qedoc Quiz Maker, and as a college or university faculty member, you have two paths open to you as regards licencing of the Qedoc Quiz Maker:

The free user route.
The paid-up user route.

If you choose the former, the modules you create with the authoring software must also be released to the public for free on our site. The licencing scheme for release of modules is exactly the same as the scheme used (as of March 2006) by the Massachussetts Institute of Technology Open Courseware programme. (Note that we are not related to MIT; it's just an example of another use of the same licencing scheme).

Advantages for you of the free user route:

You pay nothing.
The world benefits from your genius.
Other educators unknown to you may pick up your modules and develop them further, so the next time you teach a similar course, additional free materials are available to you.

Advantages for you of the paid-up user route:

You can prevent, limit and control student access to the module in a fine-grained manner.
Students cannot use the authoring programme to look up the answers unless you allow this.
Students cannot get hold of the modules before any exam you might be planning - unless you want this.
Modules can have different kinds of password protection.
Student registration ID's and verification codes can be passed through the system.

The free route therefore means open access for students as well as any other educators. If you build a test module with only about 20-50 questions covering your entire course, this may not make sense, because students could swap their entire revision programme for a quick peek at the questions and answers. However if you build a training module which contains most of the testable course content (perhaps several hundred questions) and which feeds this out in randomised short tests, the students have to learn the material one way or the other, and the Qedoc Quiz Player simply assists this process by offering a fun and educationally effective learning mechanism.

Inter-collegiate competitions

Competitions between educational institutions can be set up almost as a single-click process with our software, using what we call "private learning communities". Steps to creating an inter-collegiate competition:

Create a suitable module with the authoring tool.
Create a private learning community (click on the appropriate button in the Qedoc Quiz Player) and write down the password for it.
Pass the module and password on to your colleagues at other institutions, who pass them on to those of their students who wish to participate.

The rest of the process is entirely built-in and automated. Via the Qedoc Quiz Player interface, every password-holder has live real-time access to the competition scores and can either participate, observe or both.