GLASGOW, Scotland - 7th April 2004 - TOIA (Technologies for Online Interoperable Assessment - www.toia.ac.uk) today released the beta version of its web-based assessment management system. This eagerly-awaited product has been under development for the past 18 months by key members of the UK online assessment community, world experts in question and test interoperability and a specialised software development team. Funded by the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee, and built by Excel-Soft India, the TOIA system will be freely available to all UK further and higher education institutions. The system allows teachers to create questions and tests, to deliver them to students for automated marking, and to monitor results. It can also be used for collecting assignments which require manual marking and for delivering and processing questionnaires.

TOIA Project Manager, Jalshan Sabir said “Whether you wish to deliver a simple multiple choice test to a few students or to implement a full assessment management system across your institution, TOIA can provide the solution. Question types include multiple choice, multiple response, pull-down list, fill in the blanks, matrix, essay, Macromedia Flash, Java applet and file upload. These types have been selected to cover the needs of the majority of users after consultation with UK academic experts in online assessment.” Automated emailing facilities are closely integrated with the system so that for example students can be reminded in advance of a test or teachers notified when a test has been submitted. The sophisticated reporting system provides 24 different reports on student and group performance and question analysis.

Systems administrators will find the TOIA system a pleasure to administer with fine-grained web-based control over all user privileges and the ability to combine these into customised roles depending on the requirements of your institution such as test author, class administrator or question viewer. Hierarchical content structures based on subject area or organisational structure can be created in which to store questions and tests.

TOIA is strongly committed to the concept of interoperability and makes it easy for question and test authors to avoid lock-in to a particular proprietary format. Questions can be exchanged with other assessment systems using the IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) format. The content can be exported as IMS Content Packages and classified with metadata conforming to the IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard. This makes it easy to combine questions and tests with other learning content and to upload them to learning object repositories and systems such as WebCT or Blackboard. TOIA will also accept user lists in IMS Learner Information Package (LIP) format. The combination of QTI, Content Packaging, Metadata and LIP make TOIA the most specifications/standards-compliant assessment management system available worldwide.

TOIA is offering all UK colleges and universities the chance to try out the beta version of the system – already heavily tested and evaluated by partners across the UK – on a first come first served basis. Trials can be carried out on the TOIA server initially but the system will soon also be available freely for installation at your own institution. Support and training for TOIA users will also be provided. The product was developed in collaboration with Freedom 2 Learn Ltd, a joint venture of Excel-Soft Technologies PVT Ltd (www.excelindia.com) and Dynamic Distance Learning Ltd (www.ddluk.com).