Use Cases

These are the situations we had in mind when building Next Exams. They are our suggestions, not a limit. Your assessments will run differently, so adapt them to your needs, switch off the apps you don't use, and you may well find a use for it that we haven't thought of.

Assessment on your own site

• Situation: a form extension is standing in for a quiz, or an external testing platform holds your questions, results and personal data.
• How it can help:
  • Keep a reusable question bank filed against a subject tree
  • Bring existing questions in through CSV, Aiken, GIFT, Moodle XML or QTI 2.1
  • Run exams, results and certificates inside Joomla

Classroom or exam room

• Situation: a group sits the same paper together and someone has to supervise it.
• How it can help:
  • Share an access code with the group
  • Follow everyone on the live monitoring board and give the whole room extra time after an interruption
  • Show a room clock on a projector, with no names
  • Invite an invigilator with no Joomla account by link, PIN or QR code

Certified training

• Situation: passing an exam should lead to a credential that a third party can check.
• How it can help:
  • Issue a PDF certificate automatically on a pass
  • Give each certificate a sequential number, a validity period and an expiry
  • Let anyone check it on a public QR verification page

Revision and self-assessment

• Situation: learners want to practise without using up a real attempt.
• How it can help:
  • Use practice mode, which ignores the time limit, attempt cap and cooldown
  • Reveal feedback per question as each answer is locked
  • Show a per-subject breakdown so learners know what to revise

Exams for a named group

• Situation: only specific people may sit an exam, and some have no account yet.
• How it can help:
  • Build a cohort from hand-picked users, a Joomla user group or email invitations
  • Restrict the exam to that cohort
  • Set opening windows, attempt caps and cooldowns

Guests without accounts

• Situation: you want to assess people you do not want to register.
• How it can help:
  • Use the identified guest access type
  • Collect a name and email so the attempt and any certificate remain attributable

Courses in an LMS

• Situation: your courses live in an LMS, but you want to run the exams in Next Exams.
• How it can help:
  • Launch exams through LTI 1.3
  • Choose exams from within the LMS with Deep Linking
  • Return scores to the gradebook

Improving your question set

• Situation: you want to know whether your questions measure anything.
• How it can help:
  • Review each question's difficulty and discrimination
  • Spot questions that everyone gets right or wrong, or that strong and weak candidates answer identically

Your own setup

Connect other systems with the REST API and webhooks, or put an exam into an article with the {nextexam} shortcode. To explore a populated system first, install the demo dataset described in the Quick Start.