The University currently runs a load balanced Perception 3.4 service on two high specification Windows 2003 servers. These are back-ended by a dedicated Sun machine running Oracle 9i. The system supports 60 Question and Test authors across the university, the majority of who are academic staff.

Usage of the system has grown significantly year on year. It delivered and marked some 46,000 assessments between October 2004 and January 2005 alone.

Myles Danson, Computer Assisted Assessment Manager at Loughborough University, comments, “We have a steep change strategy in place to increase our system usage, making best use of the spare capacity that exists currently. The majority of the system use, at present, is within the Mathematics for Engineering area. This accounts for almost 70% of our traffic. The tests are generated from a question bank of over 6,000 questions, each with individual feedback. This bank of questions will increase to around 7,000 within the next six months. We are keen to share the successes within this department with others around the university and we are already seeing interest from many and varied groups.”

Marking was done automatically, as was feedback, enabling students to learn from their mistakes and improve their skills. It also took the burden of marking away from the tutors, freeing up their time for other, more productive tasks. The success of this first project has encouraged further interest and more staff from the department are now coming through for product training on Questionmark Perception.

These appointments clearly demonstrate the importance placed on online learning resources at Loughborough and the desire to further develop and extend use of the technology in the future.

Myles Danson concludes, “We are in close contact with Questionmark regarding all technical development and we support their events wherever possible. We are strong supporters of the QTI standard and this has already begun to allow universities, through national initiatives, to develop large scale question banks for the use of the wider higher education sector. There are many interesting projects underway to enhance online learning techniques and we will continue to participate and share our experience wherever appropriate.”

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