Articulate Quizmaker 09 review

With Articulate Presenter 09 and Engage 09 you can quickly produce impressive and immersive training materials. Articulate Quizmaker 09 takes things a stage further, and into full eLearning territory, by allowing you to test the end user.

To do so, you need to set up a quiz which is built up a series of graded or ungraded questions based on 11 main question types. These cover all the basics - true/false, multiple choice, fill in the blank and so on - as well as some more striking and engaging options such as matching drag-and-drop sequences and image hotspots. Once you've selected a question type, a dialog appears in which you can quickly enter your questions, answers, feedback and score by tabbing from field to field.

In previous versions, Quizmaker was limited to this tabular Form View, but the major advance in Quizmaker 09 is the introduction of a new Slide View, which lets you view and control the presentation of your quiz. Using the dialog's intuitive Ribbon-style interface you can quickly add and format shapes and text, then add multimedia by recording and editing audio and importing FLV video. You can also quickly apply slide designs and colour schemes and set up slide "masters" to give your quiz a house-style. Using the Animation and Timeline tabs you can also set up basic animations and slide transitions.

When it comes to publishing, you can output your quiz to a single EXE for CD delivery, to Word as a print version, to a LMS for tracking - Quizmaker 09 is AICC and SCORM 1.2 and 2004 compatible - or directly to the Web. It's here that the Flash-based nature of Quizmaker 09's output really comes into its own. And, unlike Engage, Quizmaker lets you wrap up your quizzes in Articulate's excellent online player to give your work a professional finish.

The new-look Quizmaker 09 makes a good standalone choice for users looking for a pain-free way to create engaging eLearning quizzes. However, it's in conjunction with Presenter 09 and so as part of the Articulate Studio 09 bundles - that the program makes most sense. Rather than publishing your quiz directly you can instead choose to integrate it into any open presentation either within the series of slides or as a new tab in the player. Put Articulate Presenter 09 and Quizmaker 09 together and it's simplicity itself to provide high-quality teaching and testing online.

Author: Tom Arah