Respondus

I like Respondus. I want Respondus. I went to the demo by the Account Mgr for Respondus. He demonstrated the 3 (soon to be 4) products of the suite and I have to say that I was actually impressed. We all know about Respondus 3.5 offering an offline assessment authoring tool, but this now makes publishing and deploying an assessment in Blackboard seamless (and you can even publish and deploy the same assessment in several Blackboard sites at the same time) - might be useful for surveys. Respondus allows the user to import questions (even containing images) from Word and publish directly into Blackboard. And Test Banks from several publishers including Thomsons, Pearson and McGraw-Hill can be downloaded for free.

StudyMate Author is a tool that allows Flash activities and multi-player games to be produced and again seamlessly published in Blackboard and they can also be viewed on mobile devices, phones and iPods. These are generated via wizards and templates and once deployed student scores can be extracted via SCORM. I was thinking that this might be useful to generate interesting and interactive activities to support pre-enrolment and applicants, which staff often struggle to develop ideas for - crosswords, jeapody, flashcards.

The next product demonstrated is not yet available - StudyMate Class Server. This plugs into Blackboard and enables staff and students to work collaboratively in generating Flash-based assessment activities, which can be converted into quizzes and linked with the Gradebook. Finally, we were shown the Respondus Lock-Down Browser. This secure browser enables any assessment in Blackboard to be 'forced' into a locked-down browser in which all browser menu functionality (apart from Refresh, it would seem), keyboard shortcuts, the systems tray and taskbar are disabled, screen-monitoring and IM are also disabled. Blackboard and website navigation (unless part of the test) is also locked. Once in the test environment students must submit the test; they cannot close or exit without. The Lock-Down Browser needs to be installed locally, and students can download this on their own machines and it is possible to perform a cluster installation. There is a two month free pilot available and I wonder whether it is worth pursuing this, along with the other products.