What software programs/apps do I need to build an online test prep/exam?
April 17, 2019 11:48 AM Subscribe
I have been tasked with creating an online course of some magnitude, complete with a final exam, to be sold/administered by my employer. This is not my field of expertise, other than that I am generally computer savvy. What should I be looking for, what kind of learning curve should I expect, and is any of it free?
We currently have our course as 250-odd animated slides in PowerPoint, broken up into six "modules." After paying someone who didn't know how to use PowerPoint to build this in PowerPoint, the Director has decided that it is too amateurish, and wants a much more professional and interactive interface, where the student is not just passively reading and reading and reading and then taking a final exam.
The goal is to have students buy the course online (that part is already working. It's set up on our regular website), and then have access to each of six modules in order, with quizzes interspersed through each module, and a long, all-encompassing test at the end.
To no one's great surprise, PowerPoint is the wrong program to use for this. We have all the copy we need, and we have all of the images that we need, but I don't know where to start when it comes to building this thing. Any and all help is appreciated.
We currently have our course as 250-odd animated slides in PowerPoint, broken up into six "modules." After paying someone who didn't know how to use PowerPoint to build this in PowerPoint, the Director has decided that it is too amateurish, and wants a much more professional and interactive interface, where the student is not just passively reading and reading and reading and then taking a final exam.
The goal is to have students buy the course online (that part is already working. It's set up on our regular website), and then have access to each of six modules in order, with quizzes interspersed through each module, and a long, all-encompassing test at the end.
To no one's great surprise, PowerPoint is the wrong program to use for this. We have all the copy we need, and we have all of the images that we need, but I don't know where to start when it comes to building this thing. Any and all help is appreciated.
There are companies that offer this sort of thing as a service, Teachable comes to mind. (I've never used them so I can't endorse them). Does something like that fit your use case?
posted by loquacious crouton at 12:04 PM on April 17, 2019
posted by loquacious crouton at 12:04 PM on April 17, 2019
Blackboard has a free version, for your purposes it should be pretty straightforward to set up.
posted by nkknkk at 12:07 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by nkknkk at 12:07 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
I don't have opinions on what would be best, but something to help you search would be the term "Learning Management System," or LMS. Cornerstone is a super-expensive one that I've used in my work life, but I found a list of LMS systems for small business that may get you started.
posted by xingcat at 12:13 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by xingcat at 12:13 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
I also came in here to say Blackboard is a typical answer for this sort of question.
posted by BlahLaLa at 12:20 PM on April 17, 2019
posted by BlahLaLa at 12:20 PM on April 17, 2019
If you're looking for something free, Moodle is your top choice, only because the amount of free and open-source resources to help you build something functional is pretty large.
You really also need to think about what the experience of taking the course will be like:
What does it mean to complete the modules?
What measures are you using to gauge success?
Do learners produce anything as part of this?
Is there some kind of documentation to show that someone has finished the course (and to what standard)?
posted by yellowcandy at 12:23 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
You really also need to think about what the experience of taking the course will be like:
What does it mean to complete the modules?
What measures are you using to gauge success?
Do learners produce anything as part of this?
Is there some kind of documentation to show that someone has finished the course (and to what standard)?
posted by yellowcandy at 12:23 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
If you want it to be interactive, and professionally designed and built, and not amateurish, going at it again from an amateur position isn't going to work. You really need a designer. I'm not even sure about what software to recommend because when you say "interactive" I'm not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean just clicking through from one screen to the next, or something more?
Two things I could recommend trying for designing it yourself or creating a prototype for a front-end developer to create for you:
Axure is software that you download and you can design the screens and clickable interactions. Then you can publish it to a url for free.
UXPin is similar but you can do it all in the web browser without downloading.
If I were doing this that is where I'd start.
posted by bleep at 12:59 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
Two things I could recommend trying for designing it yourself or creating a prototype for a front-end developer to create for you:
Axure is software that you download and you can design the screens and clickable interactions. Then you can publish it to a url for free.
UXPin is similar but you can do it all in the web browser without downloading.
If I were doing this that is where I'd start.
posted by bleep at 12:59 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: The problem with Moodle and Blackboard is that you have to go to Moodle or Blackboard. We need something we can build a course and quizzes and exam with that can live on our extant site. A student would come to our website, register/pay, log in, take the course, take the exam. Our company then takes different steps with outside entities depending on whether the student passed or failed.
posted by tzikeh at 1:19 PM on April 17, 2019
posted by tzikeh at 1:19 PM on April 17, 2019
Response by poster: If you want it to be interactive, and professionally designed and built, and not amateurish, going at it again from an amateur position isn't going to work. You really need a designer.
Assume those facts are in evidence and have been rejected.
posted by tzikeh at 1:20 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
Assume those facts are in evidence and have been rejected.
posted by tzikeh at 1:20 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
How much money you got?
Articulate Storyline (or Articulate 360) will do this for you. You can even import your existing PowerPoints so you don't have to recreate all the content just to inject some interactivity. It's not cheap, but it's cheaper than hiring an outside contractor to make this for you.
Adobe Captivate will also do this but uglier, at a lower pricepoint and the added annoyance of being an Adobe product (and kind of the one that Adobe clearly gives very few shits about, as it is not part of Creative Suite).
Lynda.com has excellent courses on both products.
WordPress also has a couple plugins that can turn a WP site into it's own little LMS. LearnDash is the one I'm most familiar with.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:28 PM on April 17, 2019
Articulate Storyline (or Articulate 360) will do this for you. You can even import your existing PowerPoints so you don't have to recreate all the content just to inject some interactivity. It's not cheap, but it's cheaper than hiring an outside contractor to make this for you.
Adobe Captivate will also do this but uglier, at a lower pricepoint and the added annoyance of being an Adobe product (and kind of the one that Adobe clearly gives very few shits about, as it is not part of Creative Suite).
Lynda.com has excellent courses on both products.
WordPress also has a couple plugins that can turn a WP site into it's own little LMS. LearnDash is the one I'm most familiar with.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:28 PM on April 17, 2019
Oh, it should be said that with Articulate and Captivate you'll be exporting SCORM and you will have to have something on your website to parse that if you want to keep any of the learner data. Oh and payment. You'll need a whole structure for alla that.
If you're in a position to make website related decisions, I'd go WordPress + LearnDash. Get an ecommerce plugin to accept payments and you're done.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:34 PM on April 17, 2019
If you're in a position to make website related decisions, I'd go WordPress + LearnDash. Get an ecommerce plugin to accept payments and you're done.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:34 PM on April 17, 2019
You can install a version of Moodle on your own server and it's relatively easy to set up if you know your way around web development. Search for "open source lms" to find others.
Whatever you do, do not try to build your own LMS. There are about a million decisions that have to be made and if you're not familiar with how LMSs work, you're going to be building it forever. (I have built my own after years and years of using other ones and it still took quite some time.)
Your boss needs to understand that what they are asking for is a very large system, even if it's only for one course. Paying to use a system that's already set up for this is going to save them so much time, effort, and headaches in the long run.
posted by dawkins_7 at 3:01 PM on April 17, 2019 [3 favorites]
Whatever you do, do not try to build your own LMS. There are about a million decisions that have to be made and if you're not familiar with how LMSs work, you're going to be building it forever. (I have built my own after years and years of using other ones and it still took quite some time.)
Your boss needs to understand that what they are asking for is a very large system, even if it's only for one course. Paying to use a system that's already set up for this is going to save them so much time, effort, and headaches in the long run.
posted by dawkins_7 at 3:01 PM on April 17, 2019 [3 favorites]
Captivate and Articulate, in particular, are going to be expensive. I would suggest using an authoring tool whose learning curve is not steep nor the price like LodeStar which gets you quizzes, modules and all that including PowerPoint import. You would be hosting a Moodle instance on your servers or pay some cash for other vendors for their LMS offerings if you do not want people to go to any other site but yours.
Disclaimer: I know the founder and have been trained in all three authoring tools.
posted by jadepearl at 3:36 PM on April 17, 2019
Disclaimer: I know the founder and have been trained in all three authoring tools.
posted by jadepearl at 3:36 PM on April 17, 2019
Conceptually, the user could log into your site, pay, and then be served up a link to the appropriate module (on Blackboard or similar), which has a gradebook and notifications you could use to trigger follow-up actions with outside entities as necessary.
I'm just saying this is a multi-million dollar business for a reason - building an LMS with robust quiz capabilities and multiple permission sets is not easy.
posted by nkknkk at 5:46 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
I'm just saying this is a multi-million dollar business for a reason - building an LMS with robust quiz capabilities and multiple permission sets is not easy.
posted by nkknkk at 5:46 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
You can run an instance of Blackboard or Moodle on your site, so it'll be in-house, and students won't ever have to leave your domain.
That said, an instructional designer is going to be a necessity to get this into any kind of shape.
posted by yellowcandy at 5:49 PM on April 17, 2019
That said, an instructional designer is going to be a necessity to get this into any kind of shape.
posted by yellowcandy at 5:49 PM on April 17, 2019
We have Thinkific running on a subdomain. Would that meet your needs?
posted by third word on a random page at 7:53 PM on April 17, 2019
posted by third word on a random page at 7:53 PM on April 17, 2019
The problem with Moodle and Blackboard is that you have to go to Moodle or Blackboard.
Just in case the objection here really is that you have to type in or click on an address with "moodle.org" or "blackboard.com", this is an vanishingly trivial technical issue to overcome and make it show up at "yourcompany.com." An issue which I'd kind of be surprised if most vendors don't already offer solutions for.
Whereas even taking off-the-shelf LMS software and running your own fault-tolerant instance of it and integrating ecommerce and all sorts of other things could easily become an effort at the level of spinning off a subsidiary IT company, much less building an LMS from scratch. Just using a customized version of a hosted LMS will be a big project but that is definitely the way you want to go.
Like maybe if you already have a robust ecommerce and login/personalization system, interspersing a very small number of multiple-choice questions amongst a bunch of slides is something a skilled polymath who already knows the existing systems intimately could pull off with some luck, but even contemplating that puts you well within “famous last words” territory because your Director will immediately ask for more features and functionality. And something like this will have a million moving parts that can easily go wrong.
Best to outsource as many of the million moving parts as possible, to someone who does the same sorts of things all the time and already has heavy-duty infrastructure in place.
posted by XMLicious at 12:01 AM on April 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
Just to support the calls for going pro. I'm an instructional designer and you can make engaging and effective online courses and quizzes in PowerPoint. The issue is not the tool; it's the instructional design expertise. That's like saying you're not a good poet in MS Word so you're hoping to find a piece of software that will turn you into one. Authoring software like Articulate Storyline or Rise, Adobe Captivate, or Lectora automates a lot of tasks, and Adapt is even open source.
Estimates are that 50%-90% of all money spent on corporate training is wasted, and it's because there's not enough time and thought given to the task long before you're opening up a software package. You get bad, ineffective courses having tried to cheap out on the task, get frustrated, and become adamantly opposed to paying more money, so the cycle is repeated. Companies end up spending way more money than if they had hired someone to do the job properly in the first place. Don't even get me started on how useless most learning objectives are, if you've not asked an instructional designer or competency analyst to help you articulate them. If you start with useless learning objectives, you get useless courses, no matter how pretty they might look.
The presentation of information is not the same as instruction. It also doesn't follow that just because you've spent decades in school that you know how to build courses. I've lived in a house all my life and I can't build one or do anything like a complex repair.
posted by angiep at 7:39 AM on April 18, 2019
Estimates are that 50%-90% of all money spent on corporate training is wasted, and it's because there's not enough time and thought given to the task long before you're opening up a software package. You get bad, ineffective courses having tried to cheap out on the task, get frustrated, and become adamantly opposed to paying more money, so the cycle is repeated. Companies end up spending way more money than if they had hired someone to do the job properly in the first place. Don't even get me started on how useless most learning objectives are, if you've not asked an instructional designer or competency analyst to help you articulate them. If you start with useless learning objectives, you get useless courses, no matter how pretty they might look.
The presentation of information is not the same as instruction. It also doesn't follow that just because you've spent decades in school that you know how to build courses. I've lived in a house all my life and I can't build one or do anything like a complex repair.
posted by angiep at 7:39 AM on April 18, 2019
Response by poster: Ah, I can see my being "careful" about saying what's going on has led to people thinking this is some sort of corporate training.
Think "online Driver's Ed course that will be approved by the state we are in" (because that's what it is).
posted by tzikeh at 7:53 PM on April 18, 2019
Think "online Driver's Ed course that will be approved by the state we are in" (because that's what it is).
posted by tzikeh at 7:53 PM on April 18, 2019
Response by poster: Also - the ability to import PowerPoint is entirely unnecessary, since the entire PowerPoint version is shit.
posted by tzikeh at 8:04 PM on April 18, 2019
posted by tzikeh at 8:04 PM on April 18, 2019
If this is a government project and is consequently bound by things like web accessibility requirements you should under no circumstances try rolling your own / building from scratch, because that's a whole other level of requirements and needed expertise. Find out exactly what regulations and laws you have to comply with and make absolutely sure any vendors involved are compliant. (Genuinely, actually compliant, not “yeah you could totally do a bunch of work and make it accessible if you really wanted to” compliant.)
Really at this point I have to agree with others that it's crazy to move forward without one or more professionals on a payroll. If you wing it at least figure out how to cover your ass, personally, for any legal liability you might create and get higher-ups to sign off in writing on non-compliance-risk-taking decisions.
posted by XMLicious at 4:04 AM on April 19, 2019
Really at this point I have to agree with others that it's crazy to move forward without one or more professionals on a payroll. If you wing it at least figure out how to cover your ass, personally, for any legal liability you might create and get higher-ups to sign off in writing on non-compliance-risk-taking decisions.
posted by XMLicious at 4:04 AM on April 19, 2019
Response by poster: It's a private company. "approved by the state" just means that completing the course is accepted as the same thing as completing a classroom-based driver's ed course. It's already taken care of. There is no government involvement.
posted by tzikeh at 7:48 AM on April 19, 2019
posted by tzikeh at 7:48 AM on April 19, 2019
Response by poster: The issue is not the tool; it's the instructional design expertise. That's like saying you're not a good poet in MS Word so you're hoping to find a piece of software that will turn you into one.
Nope. I've clearly asked the question poorly. I was trying to be as "general" as possible, and because of that all of the answers are answering a question I didn't (mean to) ask.
I'll ask the mods if I can ask the same question twice, just in another way. I'll post the answer and a link to my new question here, as soon as I can figure out what to write.
posted by tzikeh at 7:57 AM on April 19, 2019
Nope. I've clearly asked the question poorly. I was trying to be as "general" as possible, and because of that all of the answers are answering a question I didn't (mean to) ask.
I'll ask the mods if I can ask the same question twice, just in another way. I'll post the answer and a link to my new question here, as soon as I can figure out what to write.
posted by tzikeh at 7:57 AM on April 19, 2019
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by tzikeh at 11:49 AM on April 17, 2019