ElearningWorld.org

For the online learning world

Elearning World

Quizzes Compared: Final (Everyone’s a Winner, Baby)

So far we’ve had four rounds and five quizzes in our quiz comparison. There are so many quiz applications around these days that I could probably continue this series forever because by the time I finish, someone will have written a new app, but I want to restrict it to quizzes that I have actually used in teaching/training, so it’s time to wrap it up now. But before I give my recommendations, I’d like to mention a couple that don’t belong here but may be worth a separate article later on.

Honourable Mentions

I was planning to look at Nearpod quizzes, but Nearpod has so many features that it would be unfair to judge it solely as a quiz and silly to use it if you only wanted a quiz — it would be like buying a Swiss army knife when all you needed was a corkscrew. That said, I’ve used Nearpod for quizzes, and it works pretty well. Like most Nearpod features, there are other, cheaper apps that do it better, but again, the Swiss army knife analogy holds.

I first encountered Quizlet in its early days and used it for my own learning, creating flashcards for Turkish and German vocabulary. It had a classroom mode, but I never used it because it was pretty rudimentary in those days, and I was happy with Socrative. I gave up on it a couple of years ago because it was restricting the number of practice sessions I could do on the free plan (or something like that — I forget the details). While researching this article, I went and checked it out again. It’s come a long way from its humble flashcard origins; for example, it now has AI, which is pretty impressive in quiz mode though decidedly underwhelming in lesson mode. Quizlet, then, remains one of the best tools for private study; however, I’m not so sure that it competes with the other quizzes I’ve looked at for class use.

Since quizzes are used in different ways and for different purposes, it wouldn’t be fair to do a simple ranking of the quizzes, so instead I’ll select winners for different categories. Note: if you haven’t read the posts leading up to this, or would like to refresh your memory, links point back to the relevant posts.

Best for Graded Quizzes

If a quiz score will contribute to a student’s actual course grade, you need a quiz that has a measure of security (bearing in mind that no quiz is completely secure) and seamless integration with the Moodle gradebook (assuming you’re using Moodle), with good analytics as a bonus. For these reasons, Moodle’s internal quiz module still wins out over its sexier rivals.

Best for Online Course Materials

If you are creating a course to be delivered wholly or largely online, and quizzes are primarily learning rather than assessment tools, then I would go with H5P quizzes because they integrate so well with other H5P materials. Of course, if you are using some other content generation platform that has its own way of delivering quizzes or is more integrated with different quiz tools, then you should probably go for that, but for your average Moodle instructional designer, H5P is the way to go, I think.

Best Quiz/Poll Combination

This category gives us a tie between Vevox and Socrative. As I mentioned, I’m still very fond of Socrative and would recommend it for classes that have a fair number of quizzes and polls where you want to spend time discussing the answers. On the other hand, if you just want occasional quick polls and quizzes, then Vevox is a simpler solution, and its integration with PowerPoint makes it a winner for presentations. So at the moment, since I’m just giving workshops for different groups of staff and students, I’m using Vevox, but if I were to go back to classroom teaching, I would either go back to Socrative or take the plunge into the glamorous world of Nearpod.

Best Gamification

If you want a quick, fun classroom quiz, then Kahoot wins hands down. With its timers, leaderboards, colourful graphics and retro computer game music, Kahoot is an object lesson in gamification done well.

So of all the quizzes I’ve featured, every one is a winner in its own way. That is hardly surprising — after all, would I spend all this time writing about software I didn’t like? Well actually, I would — wait for my post on Turnitin!

Robin Turner

Robin Turner

Until recently, EAP instructor and Moodle systems administrator at Bilkent University, Ankara, now Learning Technologist at the Global Banking School's London Greenford campus. Interested in educational technology and gamification/game-based learning.

Add a reply or comment...