Tonight we released Version 2.11 of our LMS. This release adds a couple of features to our built-in assessment engine. While the features were added to meet the requirements of a new client of ours, they are features that were on our list of things to do and ones that benefit everyone.

Time-limited assessments

Assessments can now have time limits. You can specify how long a user has to complete the assessment. The current time remaining is displayed to the user on every screen. When the time exceeds 5 minutes, it is updated once per minute. This approach is taken so the user can focus on responding to the questions and to minimize the distraction provided by the countdown clock.

When the time remaining is less than 5 minutes, it is updated once per second.

If the user doesn’t complete the assessment within the allotted time, the assessment is automatically submitted (after notifying the user appropriately).
Our assessment engine natively supports the IMS [Question and Test Interoperability QTI Version 1.2.1 standard. QTI allows durations to be specified at the assessment level. When authoring in QTI, you just need to add a ‘duration’ element as a child of the ‘assessment’ element. The format follows [ISO 8601](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601) for durations. As an example, 30 minutes would be represented as:

<duration>PT30M</duration>

Shuffling of responses

We also added support for shuffling of responses within an assessment. We’ve had the ability to shuffle questions — so that the order of questions is randomized for each attempt — since our first release but we weren’t able to randomize the responses within a question.
Now we can, and as QTI allows, you can choose which questions you want the responses shuffled for. Within each question, you can specify whether to shuffle all responses or only some of the responses. This is useful for when you may want to shuffle all the responses except the last “All of the above” type response.

Need help? Just ask!

If you have any questions about how to take advantage of these new capabilities, please don’t hesitate to ask us.