I’ve wanted for a long time to embed questions in things like course wikis and blogs, questions that fed to a centrally managed backend system. Finally a number of people are working on this — Instructure’s Canvas mentioned this as something under development (or maybe here at this point, we’re an Angel campus, unfortunately). Bill Fitzgerald is working with Lumen Learning on LMS/WordPress integration, and I think this may be a piece of that as well.

However, if you want a simple solution available *today*, without needing an LMS, it’s available. ProProfs gives you an account (free accounts are available too) that lets you easily embed quizzes, questions, and upload fields into your wiki pages.

Here’s an example. I wrote up this page on the TL 521 wiki with some final project instructions. It’s pretty typical — watch a video, think about it, write a response.

At this point what we would usually do is either have the students write something publicly (which works great) on the wiki, or have them submit into the LMS if it needs to be private. The problem is being out on the wiki is like being out on the quad on a sunny spring day. And sending the students back into the LMS feels like sending them into an SAT center from said quad. It’s just so institutional.

Besides that, there’s a *flow* at work here. They’ve read the text and watched the video; they are ready to write. Adding the friction of the LMS at that point is ill-advised. We want to them to stay on this page to submit the project for the same reason we wanted them to stay on this page to watch the video. The way to do that is embedding. And what ProProfs does is allow you to embed your assessments the same way you embed the video:

So the student uploads….

And then it appears in  your ProProfs panel. Easy-peasy.

As I said, other options will be available soon — this isn’t an ad for ProProfs. It *is* however an example of the loosely-coupled assessment we’ve been begging for for over seven years now. It makes a ton more sense to assess in your teaching space than to teach in your assessing space. But I’d gotten so used to disappointment on this front I was unaware it had arrived. Give it a shot, the world’s your oyster.

Additional Note: I’m sure some people will say this has been available from various embeddable survey tools. Not really. ProProfs allows you to assign points, make autograded MC and fill in the blank questions, optionally authenticate a roster of students, provide feedback on wrong answers, and set number of retries. The level of functionality changes everything, because there really isn’t much you *can’t* do with it.