Update on Edumatic item types

Background

When evaluating the use of the item types that are still available in Edumatic, we have noticed that 4 item types are hardly being used anymore:

• Dialog
• Dictation
• Divide sentence
• Situational judgement

Therefore, we have decided not to convert these item types to the new assessmentQ platform. They will become "end of life". This allows the Televic Education team to focus on new item types instead that meet the needs of our customers and the broad e-assessment market. 

On this page, we want to answer the questions that you, our customer, may have on the impact of this decision.

If you do not find the answer to your question here, please get in touch with us at support@televic-education.com 

When will these 4 item types become end of life? 

The End of Life date is set to August 2023. The exact date will be communicated later as this update is linked to a release of assessmentQ.  

How will my authors know they should not create new items anymore based on these item types? 

We are informing the authors about that in assessmentQ and Edumatic:

• In Edumatic, they will: 
  • see "(deprecated)" after the item name when they want to create a new item
  • see a warning on the detail page of the item when they want to update it. 
• In assessmentQ, they will see a warning in the list of items, saying the item is end of life. 

What will happen with my existing items that have become end of life? 

In August 2023, all items with the item type Dialog, Dictation, Divide sentence or Situational judgement will be removed from the item bank. You will not be able to see or open them anymore. 

Obviously, you will not be able to search for items with these item types anymore either. 

What will happen with my existing assignments that contain items that have become end of life? 

• The end of life items will be removed automatically from all assignments with the status Draft, To be reviewed, Reviewed and Approved, i.e. from all assignments that have not been started yet. 
• The end of life items remain present in assignments with the status Live, because removing them there might change results, and we obviously must avoid that.
  • However, in the player and when reviewing an assignment, the items will not be displayed anymore. Instead, the user will see an error page with the message "This item type is no longer supported". 

How do I know which assignments contain end of life items? 

We are informing the authors about that in assessmentQ:

• Authors will be able to filter the list of their assignments by "Assignments with end of life items". This way, they will get a clear overview of all assignments that will be impacted by this update, so they can take action.
• When an author opens an assignment that contains end of life items, he will see a warning message on top of this assignment, informing him of the presence of end of life items. 

Will the results of assignments with end of life items change?

No, of course not. All reports will still contain the results of sessions that contained end of life items. Further, the item analysis will still display for existing assignments how many times an end of life item was answered correctly or incorrectly.