Questionmark Perception Now Delivers Assessments to PDAs

For Immediate Release

Questionmark Perception Now Delivers Assessments to PDAs

Innovation Makes Quizzes and Surveys Completely Portable

LONDON, UK - March 21, 2002 - Questionmark™, creators of Perception™ testing and assessment software, today unveiled a system that lets users deploy assessments to PDA (Palm and Windows CE) devices. Perception users can now deliver quizzes, tests, and surveys to PDAs as easily as they deliver them to browsers and PCs. Questionmark is providing this upgrade to its user free of charge, as blended delivery is an important part of its strategy.

Assessments have widened in the last few years from the threatening test or the boring survey to interactive instruments that can help identify training needs and provide prescriptive feedback. Now Questionmark Perception can gather information from an individual performing a task, even while they are performing it. This provides meaningful and relevant data to aid the development of training and certification programmes.

"The original idea was sparked by a hospital that wanted to survey patients at their bed-sides, and then road-shows confirmed that handheld assessments had much wider applications," said Questionmark EMEA Business Development Director, Vivienne Shaughnessy. "Today it is becoming important to gather data quickly and easily, and then present that information in a meaningful way. Now discovering training needs, how jobs are performed, which tasks are important, employee opinions, knowledge, skills, and attitudes will be as easy as picking up your PDA."

For complete details about creating and deploying Perception assessments for use on handheld devices, please visit
http://www.questionmark.com/perception/help/v2/articles/handheld/ 

Sample Perception quizzes formatted for PDAs are available at:
http://www.questionmark.com/links/PDA-Eval.htm

The Questionmark Perception login and delivery templates minimise HTML formatting to accommodate the low bandwidth of handheld devices. To date, the PDA assessment system has been tested using Palm and iPaq devices. Blazer, AvantGo and Eudora browsers have been tested running on Palm OS and Pocket Internet Explorer on the iPaq.

About Questionmark
Questionmark has been producing testing and assessment software since 1988. Questionmark Perception allows people to create question files without programming experience. Users can categorise their question banks into topics and sub-topics from which to assemble tests and surveys. They can shuffle questions and answers for each participant and preview assessments to see how they will appear post-deployment. They can present questions with videos, graphics and a wide variety of styles. Participants receive feedback as specified by the author. Answers are saved to an encrypted file for scoring and analysis in a variety of report formats.

Businesses, governments, schools, colleges, and universities in more than 50 countries use Questionmark software. Questionmark has more than 1,200 customers using Perception, with approximately 10,000 authoring systems installed, and systems shipped have been configured with approximately 3,000,000 participants. Typical applications include exams, quizzes, study aids, diagnostic tests, pre-course skills assessments, ISO 9000 compliance, and course evaluations. Questionmark is actively involved with the IMS Global Learning Consortium and supports open standards. 

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