Staff assessment as SaaS 

It is and important part of staff development and customer assurance that companies ensure they are up-to-speed on the latest technologies, products and services offered by the business, and the latest best practices that are in use. It is also becoming far more common for common for both the learning and assessment components of this process to be conducted online, so staff can work on training at their own pace.

To help accommodate this trend, US-based Questionmark has updated its Questionmark OnDemand,  SaaS-delivered assessment service to accommodate mobile and touchscreen delivery of more question types, together with flexible data gathering and the ability to create targeted, configurable reports.

Questionmark’s business is in enabling organisations to measure knowledge, skills and attitudes for certification, regulatory compliance, successful learning outcomes, performance improvement and talent management.

Security is, of course, important in this process and the OnDemand service uses the company’s OData API to provide secure access to assessment results data, enabling administrators to access it via custom dashboards or to analyse it using applications such as Excel or Tableau.

OData feeds, based on the Open Data Protocol for querying and updating data, make it possible to produce targeted, configurable reports that reflect only the information stakeholders want and need. Stakeholders can either use dashboards for quick overviews or receive highly detailed reports, depending on their particular requirements.

The release also brings improved support for mobile assessments. It features a responsive design utilising HTML5-based technology to improve the appearance and usability of assessments, regardless of the size and shape of a participant’s mobile device. Drag and Drop and Hotspot questions can now be included in assessments taken from an iPad, iPhone or Android devices – and Flash questions now work on all Flash-enabled mobile devices.

Other improvements include the ability to highlight text within a question for participants to revisit later -- and to strike through choices they wish to eliminate from consideration. There is also now full support for right-to-left delivery of languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.

There is also now an Assessment Content Report, which allows users to review participant comments for all questions within an assessment, topic, or specific question. Other report types now available include Item Analysis Report enhancements, including support for Multiple Response, Matching, and Ranking question types, plus options to ignore question and assessment revisions when running the report and to obtain detailed information about excluded questions.

Questionmark’s assessment management systems are available OnDemand or for on-premise deployment. They enable collaborative, multilingual authoring, and multiple delivery options include a wide range of mobile devices.

The company’s flexible APIs and support of major industry standards also ensure interoperability with a variety of enterprise systems.