The following appeared in Volume 98, Number 2 (Spring, 1999) of the APA Newsletters

In recent years, the use by college teachers of the World Wide Web has been expanding rapidly, an understandable trend considering that the Web provides an easily accessible means to make course-specific information available to students. Scripting languages such as JavaScript and ActiveX offer a new and potentially valuable tool to the academic web author: interactivity. Now students can actively seek information and respond to queries on a web site. One potentially valuable application of these languages is the development of interactive quizzes and exercises which students can work on outside the classroom at any computer with access to the Web. With online quizzes, students can use their own computers in dorm rooms or at home to access the material, which encourages higher usage than the old method of putting computer quizzes on machines in an often over-used computer lab.

The obstacle to pursuing this course for many teachers has been the enormous expenditure of time required to master the scripting languages themselves. During a busy semester, its hard to find any time for such work. Fortunately, scripting editors are appearing on the scene that promise to relieve teachers of these excessive time demands.

One program that I have found useful is Hot Potatoes, developed by Half-Baked Software, a team of three programmers— Stewart Arneil, Martin Holmes, and Hilary Street—working out of the University of Victoria Language Centre. Hot Potatoes is available as freeware from Holmes’ homepage at.

Hot Potatoes is actually a suite of five programs, each of which is designed to create a different type of online, interactive quiz. JBC creates multiple choice quizzes that are automatically graded; JQuiz produces short-answer quizzes; JMix, jumbled-sentence quizzes; JCloze, fill-in-the-gap quizzes in a text; and JCross creates crossword puzzles from entered words and clues. Although the programs were designed to be used with language classes, two or three of the types of quizzes generated by these programs can easily be used with philosophical content. I have found that JBC and JQuiz are the most useful for my purposes: developing quizzes and exercises in ethical reasoning. JCross is also useful for developing an interesting exercise to test the student’s command of technical vocabulary.

The great thing about these programs is that the user doesn’t require any knowledge of scripting language to use them. Each program presents an editing screen with separate windows where the text of various components of the quiz is entered. When the quiz is finished, a click of the "Export to Web" button directs the program to produce the necessary html files with imbedded JavaScript that can then be placed on a web server for public access. However, for those who do know JavaScript, and wish to customize the source code, an "Edit Raw HTML" option provides editable access to this code. HTML code can also be used directly in the editing windows, which allows special font and character codes to be used when needed.

The programs also allow the author to configure the output web pages in a number of ways. All of the programs have configurable options for editable titles and instructions, the inclusion of link buttons for a contents page or the next exercise in a series, and the use of background graphics (by default the programs produce a white background).

JBC offers, in addition, two very helpful options. The first is the option to include a reading text that appears alongside the quiz in a separate frame. This can be used to test students’ comprehension of a text. The second option is the inclusion of feedback text that displays in a separate frame when any answer is clicked. This allows the author to explain to students why an incorrect answer they chose was wrong, or, if they chose the right answer, to provide any additional information that might afford a deeper understanding of the material.