How would you like access to the newest Respondus and StudyMate features before they are officially released? It’s now possible if your institution has a campus license of Respondus or StudyMate.
Instead of holding back new features once they’ve completed quality assurance testing, we are now making them available to institutions as part of an ongoing beta program. The beta versions, which will be updated periodically, can be downloaded only by the administrator of the Respondus or StudyMate license at an institution. The software is available from the administrator download area and includes a brief overview of the new features.
Speaking of new features, here are some of the ones available in the current beta releases of Respondus and StudyMate:
Respondus Beta (Nov-12-2004 release)
Batch Publishing
A "Batch Publishing" task is now available from the Preview & Publish menu in Respondus. This feature allows an exam/survey to be published to multiple courses in one step. For example, an instructor with multiple sections of an online course can publish a quiz to all sections at once. Similarly, a survey can be published to all courses in a department in a single step.
The Batch Publishing task works with Blackboard 6.x, eCollege, WebCT 4.x, and WebCT Vista 2.1 and higher. (This feature will NOT work with Blackboard 5.x or WebCT 3.x servers.)
Blackboard 6 Communities
It is now possible to publish exams or surveys to a "community" in Blackboard 6. The communities are listed with the regular courses during the publishing step.
StudyMate Beta (Nov-12-2004 release)
Crossword Puzzles
A Crossword Puzzle activity has been added to the One Answer template in StudyMate. This activity will compile a traditional Crossword puzzle using "One Answer" items.
SCORM support
StudyMate now generates SCORM-compliant objects. If the e-learning platform supports the time and grading features in SCORM, the time spent on each StudyMate activity and the grade for quizzes can be passed back to the system. SCORM options have been integrated into the Publish Wizard for Blackboard 6 and WebCT Vista. A third option allows a SCORM object to be saved to a hard drive for use with other SCORM-compliant systems.
Printing
A Printing task is now available from StudyMate’s Preview & Publish menu. Various formatting options are available and the final document can be printed directly from StudyMate or saved to MS Word format.
It’s important to note that the new features in the beta software do not yet have documentation available for them. For most features this isn’t a problem, but you may have to "explore" a bit to learn the full capabilities of a new task.
Full technical support is provided for our beta releases. So if you have questions or problems with a new feature, please visit our technical support page at
www.respondus.com/esupport
As noted above, the beta versions can only be downloaded by the administrator of the Respondus or StudyMate license at an institution. The beta versions are available from the administrator download area.
Source: Respondus, Inc. (www.respondus.com)
Originally Published: November 17, 2004
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