Survey and quiz – Hot Potatoes

Survey and quizzes can be fun online and it’s really easy to create/convert your own using survey and quiz tools. Online polls (a type of quiz) are often used too.

Features

Need to download the software, the Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, which enable you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the web. Once created you just put them on your website or web space.

Cost

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. Other users must pay (a single user licence is $120 US).

What it's used for

Teaching people how easy it is to create quizzes online.

Why it's good

It’s easy to download and to create the quizzes. Fabulous selection of tutorials in a range of languages.

Problems/downside

Need to have somewhere to put them i.e. a website/space.

Examples to check out (places to play are marked with an *)

  • The Hot Potatoes tutorial site - http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/hotpot/tutorials6.htm  has heaps of examples.

Alternatives

Please add your favourite one here.

Criteria/factors re tools and processes – Hot Potatoes

Criteria Comment
User friendly
Yes Easy to download and use.
Push or pull in kind
Pull Need to let people know where to go to do the quiz or survey.
Low or high interaction with participants/facilitators
Low The quiz/survey itself doesn’t do this although it can be combined with features that are high interaction (like debriefing results on the discussion board or chat session)
Synchronous or asynchronous activity,
Asynchronous Participants can respond whenever they wish so long as the quiz is available.
Facilitator skills of a low or high level
Medium Fairly easy to set up and use but need higher skills in quiz making to make it effective!
Participant skills of a low or high level
Low Friendly interface so easy to use.