Overview
In these release notes
assessmentQ 2.2 contains the following new features and improvements:
- New Schedules module
- Update scalability
- URL updates
- New Themes module
- Support for dark and high-contrast mode in the assessmentQ player
- New assignment template settings
- Support for API RestHooks
- Economic item types available in assessmentQ backoffice
- New options in the Assignments module
- Automatic start of a recording
New schedules module
Starting from assessmentQ 2.0 the Schedules module is available in the assessmentQ backoffice. Backoffice users can now complete the entire workflow from item creation to reporting in the assessmentQ backoffice.
The new Schedules module contains new and highly requested features and possibilities:
- You can now remove a user or user group from a schedule, even when the users have already started the schedule.
- You can also remove an assignment again from a Live schedule.
- Each schedule has a schedule history for audit purposes. In the schedule history you see who published, edited, or archived a schedule.
- The lifecycle of a Schedule consists of 5 statuses: Draft, Published, Live, Finished, Archived.
- You can choose to send e-mail notifications to all participants in the schedule or only to the participants who did not start.
- You can share a schedule with other coaches.
- You can see extra information on every assignment in a schedule, such as the total score and the selected review template. The latter is useful for example when you are defining the review period for a schedule.
Update scalability
The scalability of assessmentQ has improved significantly. assessmentQ can now cope with thousands of users starting an assignment at exactly the same time in the same environment. This allows our customers to organise large-scale exams without any technological restrictions. This is truly a great milestone in the evolution of assessmentQ.
assessmentQ now uses a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for media. As a result, media files (images, videos, etc) are delivered from the nearest server. This results in improved loading times and better scalability of the application.
URL updates
Although our product has been renamed to assessmentQ in 2019 already, the assessmentQ player and the access code page were still available via an Edumatic URL.
Starting from assessmentQ 2.2 the new URLs of assessmentQ are:
| Portal | https://<subdomain>.assessmentq.com |
| Backoffice | https://<subdomain>.backoffice.assessmentq.com |
|
Access code page |
https://<subdomain>.assessmentq.com/accesscode |
| Self-registration with group code |
https://<subdomain>.assessmentq.com/register |
Note:
- The URL <subdomain>edumaticonline.com will continue to work, however www.edumaticonline.com is no longer supported.
- For more information on how to start the assessmentQ player via the assessmentQ API, see the API documentation.
New themes module
As an administrator you can now define the branding of your assessmentQ environment in the new Themes module.
You can:
- define the logos, background images, and colours that must be used in a theme.
- set the default theme for your assessmentQ environment.
The default theme is used on the sign in page, the portal, the self-registration page, the access code page and in the assessmentQ e-mails. - add extra themes that authors can use in their assignments.
If no extra themes are available, the default theme is used in assignments.
Support for dark and high-contrast mode
Accessibility is an important trend in e-assessment: it is crucial that people with low vision or color vision deficiencies get the same chances as other people when taking an exam. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are generally accepted accessibility standards with which e-assessment platforms should try to comply.
As an administrator, you can activate a dark mode and a high contrast mode for your assessmentQ environment:
- Authors will be able to switch view modes in the item or assignment preview, so they can make sure upfront that their content works in all view modes.
- The participants will be able to select the dark mode or high contrast mode via the Preferences menu in the portal and player.
New assignment template settings
Two new assignments template settings have been added:
- Shown an overview of all available parts in between parts
As an author, you could already define whether or not the part overview should be shown at the beginning of the assignment before opening the first part.
Starting from assessmentQ 2.2 you can also define whether the part overview should be shown in between the parts of your assignment. When the part overview is not shown in between parts, the participant will navigate directly to the first item of the next part after finishing the previous part.
This new setting is available for the Linear navigation mode and the Free navigation within parts mode.
The setting for the part overview has moved to the navigation mode options:
- Show or hide the Finish button
When you hide the Finish button, the participant can no longer finish a part or an assignment.
Hiding the Finish button is typically used in combination with time limits on assignment parts and hiding the parts overview.
The combination of these options ensures that:- the transition between parts is done automatically when the time limit on the level of the part has expired.
- the assignment is finished automatically when the time limit on the last part of the assignment had expired.
As a result, participants starting an assignment at the same time, will finish at the same time.
This option is available in the Buttons and labels tab of the assignment template.
Support for API RestHooks
The new assessmentQ API RestHook sends an event when a session is finished after you subscribed to this event. This way it is no longer necessary to poll the assessmentQ API to know if a session is finished. Upon the SessionFinished event, the user's report can be retrieved.
In the current implementation of the API RestHook, the sessionFinished event is supported. Depending on the API integration needs of our customers, more events can be supported in future releases.
Economic item types
The following three economic item types are now available in the assessmentQ backoffice:
- Balance sheet
- Profit and loss account (formerly called Income statement)
- Appropriation of profits (formerly called Income processing)
These items have the following new features or options:
- The author can now select a model or switch the model used in a certain item.
- The author can choose to show or hide the account number in front of the gap.
- When choosing the scoring mechanism Score per gap, the author can choose to have a maximum score based on the number of gaps that should contain a value.
If your model contains 60 gaps, for example, but the participant must enter only 6 values in the model, then you can set the maximum score to 6 instead of 60.
More information, see Balance sheet, Profit and loss account, Appropriation of profits
New options in the Assignments module
After the release of the Assignments module in assessmentQ 2.0, our customers had some feedback and feature requests to further improve the module. Many of these feature requests have now been implemented, resulting in an Assignments module that is even more flexible and easy to use.
The following improvements have been implemented:
- It is possible to bulk move or bulk delete items in an assignment.
- In the Items tab of an assignment, you can now also see the total number of items and the total score, so you don’t have to switch to the Overview tab to see that information.
- It is possible to permanently delete an assignment from the Archive. This is especially useful in case of assignments you only used to test something.
- You can still enable or disable grading for an assignment even when the assignment is live.
- When you have deleted the last session of a live assignment (in the Reporting module), the assignment gets the status Approved again and can be edited again. So when an author wants to fully test an assignment from the end user’s perspective, and then do further edits, he can do that now.
- You can now use images and videos in the end message that is displayed to the users now, to make the feedback more interactive.
- You can easily update an item in an assignment: by clicking Edit it is opened in the Item bank and after editing it, you can reload it in your assignment.
Note: In the Analysis module you can now also edit an item. When you want to eliminate an item because it contains wrong content for example, a direct link to the item allows you to update it in the item bank immediately. This way, you don’t have to search it in the Item bank anymore.
Automatic start of a recording
As an author, you can activate a new option in the Recording item type Start recording automatically:
- When you enable this option and the option Consecutive recording is disabled, the recording will start automatically as soon as the user opens this item.
- When you enable this option and the option Consecutive recording is enabled, the recording will start automatically as soon as the playback of the source file is finished.
- You can define a delay for the automatic recording to start. If activated, the participant will hear a beep in the player the last five seconds before the recording starts.
Note: Starting from assessmentQ 2.2 the Recording item is now also supported on Safari 14.1.1 and higher.