It's a Brave New World

When thinking about a title for my post this week, "Brave New World" immediately came to mind. Shakespeare and Huxley probably wouldn't mind. I have learned this week a whisper of the knowledge IT professionals have, but I feel very successful (and now I know why they're paid so much). The idea I first had for the remediation of a document into a viable digital format seemed simple, but making it a reality was far from it.

At my job with the Georgia Department of Defense Environmental Stewardship Directorate, we had always wanted to create online quizzes for the soldiers in the field who were our first line of defense against those pesky regulators and inspectors. A rudimentary PowerPoint deck with animations was as far as we could develop. I had written the coursework, taught the courses, and used the PowerPoint question and answer method with the participation of the entire class at the same time. Of course, the more vocal students always gave the answers, but 90% of the class would already have their mind on where to have lunch. They would return to their units, which were scattered from Dalton to Valdosta and Lagrange to Savannah, with coursebooks, handouts, and hard copies of the slide deck quiz. The only method of determining if they learned anything was when our assessors would visit the sites and document, on paper, any findings that a regulator would write.

I chose to use that experience to create an interactive quiz available to all on a website that would have pictures related to each question with multiple choice answers. One would think that with all of the "plug-and-play" DIY web site possibilities it would be a snap. Nope - not for me.

After creating a quiz in Canva, I couldn't save it or export in a format that was interactive. I already had the domain from a previous week's assignment, so I began researching how to use it to create the interactive quiz I so desired. It took me three days of diligent trial and error with a couple of different plug-ins and upgrades to plug-ins to develop a workable environmental quiz. It's interactive with immediate feedback of the selection turning green if chosen correctly and red if an incorrect answer is chosen while displaying the green correct answer to the student. Photos related to the questions and answers are on each page. A results page provides the percentage achieved correctly with the average of all students calculated as a metric. The results page also has a recap of the quiz for the student to review. I didn't set time limits or a certain number of attempts allowed, so there is the option to retake the quiz as often as one wishes.

The use of photos then created the challenge of incorporating citations within the Quiz Maker Pro plugin. There was no option readily available to be able to add text on individual quiz pages for photo citations. There may be one in the labyrinth of paths and choices, but that's for me to learn in the future. The end result was listing all of the citations on the bottom of the first page of the quiz. Not necessarily an attractive layout, but the entire endeavor is more practical than entertaining.

Feel free to check your environmental regulatory prowess at https://rmdrummond.net/quiz/ .