Hot Potatoes

The Hot Potatoes is created by the University of Victoria in Canada and the suite includes six applications, enabling you to create:

• interactive multiple-choice;
• short-answer;
• jumbled-sentence;
• crossword;
• matching/ordering;
• and gap-fill exercises.

Hot Potatoes is not freeware, but it is free of charge for those working for publicly-funded non-profit-making educational institutions, who make their pages available on the web.

It is a tool that can be integrated easily within current e-Learning pages but it is not a very sophisticated application. It is more suitable if you want some extra interactive, web-based exercises within a module.

Due to the limitations it is not the right environment if you want to offer real testing and assessment (e.g. with all the reporting functionality).

Questionmark Perception

Questionmark is one of the oldest products in the e-assessment market. The Questionmark environment has tools similar to other assessment tools:

• Author questions and organize them into exams, quizzes, tests or surveys.
• Schedule assessments for participants and groups.
• Deliver via standard web browser, secure browser, PDA, CD or paper.
• Report on and analyze results using 11 different types of reports.

Questionmark Perception's Authoring Manager allows you to create, import and design questions in a number of different formats called question types. All question types can include graphics, multimedia, Flash, sound, videos, and URLs pointing to useful learning materials. Perception Authoring Manager allows you to use 22 different question wizards to create a wide of question types.

Questionmark can be used for a large number of users and can also be used in a secure environment for certification purposes.