I've upgraded the Matching question to a drag and drop style, similar to the sequencing drag and drop.
First of all, here's what it looks like -
Second of all, you can try it out for yourself with the Italy sample quiz
The question type now also allows partial credit to be awarded for partially correct matching questions - the marking scheme is simple, the score is proportionate to the number of matches that are correct, rounded up to the nearest whole point.
Question Writer 3 has moved into Beta. This means that the major bugs have been ironed out and all the new features have been added. There will still be updates as we discover and correct more minor issues.
If you're just starting out with Question Writer, I'd advise moving straight to the < ahref="http://www.questionwriter.com/downloadpages/download-quiz.html">Question Writer Beta - it's already got a lot more features and is more stable than the old Question Writer 2 - Quiz Edition.
As Bart Simpson famously said, "Lady, what you don't know about metadata is enough to fill a warehouse." Metadata is a very big subject. It's data about data and if you're organizing a lot of questions, at some point you're going to want to use metadata to describe them.
You can now add four metadata elements to questions - Title, Description, Identifier and Keywords. These are really the basics - I've kept them out of the way in a seperate node, so if you're not using them, you probably won't even notice them, but potentially this metadata node could be expanded over time to include all the other elements.
My philosophy on software design is that the software should 'just work' and the software should automatically try to fix problems it knows about rather than sending you off looking for support. Here's a new fix that illustrates the idea.
If you've used QW2 with special characters - you might have seen a small box shown instead of the character you were hoping to see. A picture is worth a thousand words . . like this . . .
It happens when the special character isn't available in the font - this happens quite a lot with numerical symbols, and Japanese or other foreign language characters. You can fix it by changing the font - but I'd rather it 'Just Worked' first time.
So now, if it is finds a missing character, it'll substitute in a character from a font (MS Sans Serif) that will usually have the character available . . . like this . . .
So there will be users concerned about the typography . . . those users need to make a more considered choice of font for best effect . . . but for most users with the occasional special characters - it 'just works'.
Another new feature in QW3 - this is more technical, but if you're using your own script to process results, you can now define your own server in your quiz in the Web Settings -
You can also define the backup server, which is used if the main server can't be reached. If you're not using a backup server, just make this the same as the main server, and the quiz will continue to try to reach the main server until it is reachable.
Here's another feature that I've just added to the Alpha - it effectively sets a minimum score of 0 for Partial Credit questions by default.
Say you have a question that includes negative scoring, but you don't want to allow an overall negative score to be offset against other scores in the quiz - you'd leave this switched off. If you want to discourage guessing so that a wrong answer on one question will offset a correct answer in another section, switch it on.
We've just added Polish to our list of supported languages in Question Writer 3.
Did you know that in Poland, men and women will often use different forms of the same surname in the same family, men using the variant ending in 'ski' and women the one ending in 'ska'? You learn something new every day.
If you haven't looked at it yet - do check out the online results system. This allows you to view all of your results in the same place so that you can view them as a list rather than trying to organize all the e-mails. It's got results going back to September 2007, so if you've been using the results-by-email service for a while, you'll already have plenty of data stored to view online.
Previously, the only way to change the background image was to create a whole new theme. Now you're able to override the background and loader images much more easily.
You can use any .gif, .jpg or .swf(version 6 and under) to display as a background for your quiz, and as a loading image. This means that your quiz can fit seamlessly into your website or corporate brand.
This is only going to make sense if you're technically minded, but there's now a code library to help creating Question Writer quizzes. If you'd like to export to the Question Writer format from your .NET application or website, you can use this QW_API.dll - there's also full documentation on how to use it.