Potential applications for online testing

With most of the companies around the globe adopting online training for their employees it is inevitable for them to seek methods/systems to measure the level of learning. Most of the online courses will have some sort of a test or assessment at the end, which the trainee will be asked to submit before they can get their certifications. Quizzes within courses are meant to teach and test the understanding of the training. In other words, these tests within courses are primarily from a training perspective.

But what about the cases where your primary objective is not to provide course material but to test the candidate’s knowledge over a wide variety of skills/subjects? The organization (or the examiner) needs to be able to set metrics and measure the test takers against these metrics. You have to prepare over a wide set of skills and then take an online exam which will behave differently for each candidate. The idea behind this diversity is the usage of question pools to create such exams. Most of these desktop tools will let you create question pools and the like but it will be much easier if you could create questions in the LMS itself and then set up online exams which can be later assigned to candidates.

Vitalect's Techniq Certifier is such an online exam system.  It provides you the ability to create question pools from which you can re-use a set of questions over and over again, spanned across a number of exams. So you won't have to re-create the questions every time when you are dealing with exams of similar nature.

Let us consider some real life examples. An organizations might wish to qualify their consultants before they send them out into the field to work with their customers. They will let the aspiring consultants take these tests in a proctored environment and see the results. If the candidates fail then they can be enabled to take the test again after a certain time period. Since the questions for the same exam comes from a pool of questions the candidates will be tested differently in the subsequent attempts.

Techniq Online University-Citrix Online Integration

During our product demonstrations we often get asked about our integration with Webex Training Center and Citrix Online's GoToTraining product. Customers and prospects wish to know what it is, why it is important and how it can help them. In this blog post we explore these issues further.In this blog we will discuss our Techniq Online Platform's integratation with Citrix Online's Gototraining product/service. Firstly, this integration with Citrix Online products like GoTo Training helps our clients manage all their training under one integrated platform. It serves as an integrated custom portal for all forms of training courses including self-paced courses, videos, podcasts, live in-person traditional classes and Citrix Online Training sessions. This portal acts as a single point of entry for all end-users – customers, partners, employees, administrators, course authors, managers etc.

Overview of the Flow

The Techniq Online University acts as the front-end to the end-user while communicating with Citrix Online products at the backend. This is completely transparent to the end-user. A registered user on our platform can sign up for a Citrix Online Training session and later join the session at the Event start time from the Techniq Online University or directly via the email they receive on registration. Administrators can schedule GoTo Training sessions from within our platform. In other words, they do not have to login to Citrix Gototraining. The Admin can also

eLearning Software as a Service (SaaS): Integration is key

The last decade has seen an explosion of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. The elearning industry has also been influenced by this paradigm shift. The elearning industry turned from being virtually non existent to a multi billion dollar industry catering to a wide variety of learning and training needs (both profit and non-profit) across the globe during the last couple of decades. This phenomenal growth was further helped by the introduction of a variety of new technologies. Video hosting and streaming services, online meetings and virtual classroom technologies, online hosting and collaborating on documents, presentations etc have transformed the elearning industry. All these can be used separately or in conjunction with other technologies to enhance the online learning experience. Even social networking has its fair share of contribution in enriching the learning experience of millions by providing ways to conduct group discussions, collecting feedback or even by conducting informative debates on the subject material.

Another interesting recent development is the rise of mobile computing. Even though the mobile platform has huge potential, many people still consider mobile elearning to be a "nice to have", but not mission critical to their training offering. A primary reason for this is that most mobile screens are not sufficiently large enough to properly enjoy the courses. Moreover until recently courses were created using flash. Such courses don't work on Apple's iPad or iPhone (though flash supported browsers are available). So most often courses will have to be custom made for the mobile platform or old courses will have to be converted to HTML 5. The success of a mobile solution depends essentially on the content provided, ease of use and its seamless integration with the online learning application. 

With such diverse training methods and solutions available in the market, choosing the right platform will be a nightmare for the uninitiated. The previous post talks at length about the factors that should be considered before picking the right delivery platform. In this post