Tuesday, 23 January 2007

Hotpot + Scorm 2.1 --> Blackboard

One of the interesting steps in the well-known exercise software Hot Potatoes is the integration of the exercises in a learning environment (Blackboard - EloV) in our case.
What's this all about? For years teachers and educators have been using Hot Potatoes to develop interactive online exercises, but to me the feedback/evaluation was always a weak point. Students could do the exercises and read the feedback linked to correct or wrong answers. But in the end they just got a percentage, so that the feedback for the teacher was very poor. Teachers need to study the results, need to see whether the student made a typing mistake or a fundamental mistake, so that remediation is possible. That was difficult with Hot Potatoes... I preferred the exercise module of the Blackboard learning environment, since there it is possible to check the real answer of the student and adjust the marks if necessary.
Thanks to the SCORM norm it is possible to develop exercises and content in third party programs and import them into the learning environment.
Now Hot Potatoes has taken that step (in Beta). From any exercise module it is now possible to export the exercise to a zipped scorm file, which you can then import into Blackboard.
In a first, brief test this morning three out of four exercises seemed to work after importation. During the next few days, I will be testing all the possibilities.

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