In keeping with last month's review of Macromedia's Flash 8 ... Question Writer is a product which utilizes Flash and provides the novice Flash user with the ability to create e-learning quizzes, tests and assessments without any programming or scripting knowledge.

Having learnt and utilized a number of e-learning authoring tools I found the Question Writer interface surprisingly refreshing. A little different from the others but not so different ... as a quick buzz through the online tutorial and I was up and running and fine-tuning my own quiz. I needed to acclimatize to the hierarchy of the different elements but once that was clear the tool was very easy to use.

What I like about the interface is the "drag and drop" functionality ... if you have created a complex "scoring" system in one test, you can simply drag it across to a new test and reutilize it without recoding. Similarly, inside a test you can "copy" and "paste" individual items from the tree menu, with prompts from the program if you try to "paste" something into the wrong place.

The main screen of Question Writer is broken into two parts, with the tree-menu to the left and the preview pane to the right. To preview you need to compile the program ... but the compiler is very quick and shows you the stages it is going through in a pop-up. Slick.

You're not limited to text either, as you can import virtually any external Flash content, Multimedia files such as pictures, videos, audio and animations can also be incorporated into your tests. Of course, if you wanted to customize the external Flash content you would have to know something about Flash development to do so.

Apart from importing Multimedia, there are multiple choices (eh eh) in regards to question types as well ...

Multiple Choice Questions include

• single answer
• multiple answer
• true/false
• Likert scale
• matrix based
• hotspot

Open Ended Questions  include

• fill-in-the-blank
• essay style
• short answers
• numeric entry
• multiple entry
• matrix based text-entry

The product is a little pricey at $USD1795.00 but what you get for the price is the ability to develop professional e-learning assessments in hours not months. A huge production saving in my opinion.

Question Writer gets a thumbs up from me, I enjoyed learning the product to review it and found it to be slick, professional and definitely comparable to some of those more familiar e-learning authoring tools out there.

You can browse through some examples of quizzes here.