Imagine one of the following scenarios:

You are to teach a subject with hard facts, e.g. mathematics, physics or grammar. Your students are no more motivated than other young people. There's a limit to how much you can put into their heads by talking. They learn much faster and better by trying things out, i.e. by solving problems, and you wish to take advantage of this fact. The students get most profit from fast feed-back, but you can only help a limited number of them in the time allotted. And you can only correct and return so many assignments. Getting corrected assignments back a number of days after they were submitted isn't very motivating. And for your students as well as you, it takes time to get in and out of the problem-solving situation. Much would be won with the possibility of having problem answers corrected straight away.

QuizComposer is an Internet-based tool, giving you this possibility amongst others to be detailed below. As suggested by the name the system is used to create quizzes, i.e. sets of problems expressed via one or more questions. The problems can be small or large. However, the questions must have a unique answer or at least an answer within an interval or within a given set of possibilities. In these cases the system can immediately compare an answer to a question with the possible answers and return the result to the student straight away. Answers can take the form of numbers or character strings (words) or clicks of one or more buttons as in multiple-choice quizzes.

An incorrect answer can return a hint defined by the the author of the quiz (about authors, see below). Hints to answering a question can be different depending on the number of attempts made to answer that question. A hint can depend on what answer was given.

A correct answer can return a rewarding text or figure, etc.

You can create so-called hyper-quizzes that present only one question at a time. The answer to a question determines which question to be presented next. The next question can belong to the same quiz or it can be the first question in another quiz. Hyper quizzes are very suitable for training stuctured reasoning.

You can specify for a quiz that incorrect answers be registered in a base so that you can see which questions are causing your students most trouble.

Questions, hints and rewards can be phrased utilizing all the possibilities offered by the Internet standards. For example, you may include images and pictures in the text as well as references to any accessible home page on the Internet, ofcourse.

The quizzes themselves are pages on the Internet. They are placed on a server and unless they are so-called test quizzes can be viewed by anyone with access to the server.

The quizzes with all included material or referenced material can be authored by you or another person, e.g. a colleague or the school master or the ministry of education, in fact, anybody. But it can only be placed on a server by somebody authorized to do so. Mostly such a person is called a quiz author on the said server even if the quiz has been authored by somebody else. In some connexions the designations quiz owner or quiz organizer are used instead. You are registered as a quiz author by the administrator of the server. The latter person may be somebody responsible for the server or he/she may have been authorized to register quiz authors by the person responsible for the server. The quiz server can be located anywhere, on your school, at the ministry of education, in your own home, etc.

A quiz author can be autonomous, normally a person in flesh and blood. But the notion of a quiz author can also, and most often, cover a course. Then more than one person may be authors of quizzes on the course, they have an identity (the name of the course) and a password in common, and therefore also a responsability.

Access to a quiz server can be direct, i.e. by pointing at home pages on the server, or it may be through a higher-level system for communication between all parties on a school, say, to which the quiz server is subordinate. Then it is the administrator of the higher-level system, that defines authors and courses etc. on the quiz server, and thus the access to the quiz server for persons registered on the communication system (teachers and students).

Creating simple quizzes is rather easy, in simple cases as easy as typing them with a word processor. And you don't have to copy and distribute them, not to mention, correcting them. Simply clicking a few buttons presents you with a form. You fill in some of the entry fields, for example just for a start the quiz name, the first question phrase and the specification of the correct answer(s). Clicking the submit button sends the form to the server which immediately presents the quiz ready for answering. Try entering an answer, whether right or wrong, and see what happens. If you wish to try another answer click the "Back" button in the browser window. Try going back to the definition form to alter the the quiz, for example by adding one or more lines in the hint field for the question and re-submit the form.

As you feel more experienced you can try some of the more advanced features of the system and of the Internet, for example by copying and modifying the examples.

There are more possibilities concerning question phrases and answers. Certain browsers are capable of displaying mathematical formulas written with keyboard characters graphically. QuizComposer has a built-in translator from keyboad form to code representing graphical form.

QuizComposer has a built-in analyzer of simple algebraic formulas for compairing answers of this type, for example (a+b')*(a-b') with a specification of a correct answer, e.g. a^2 - b'^2.

A server can be set up with interface programs to "external" programs, which can compare an answer to a question with the specification of possible correct answers to the question. Examples of external programs are Maple, Mathematica and YACAS for working with mathematical formulas.

All these possibilities are described in a guide which you access by clicking a certain tag in the definition form. There are examples too, which you access via appropriate buttons.

The kind of quizzes described here, offering the possibility of entering a new answer to an incorrectly answered question are called dialog quizzes.

Over and above dialog quizzes you can create so-called test quizzes. These can only be answered once. The questions can have an attached percentage score which may be distributed over answer parts - such as for questions to be answered by clicking buttons. Furthermore, in test quizzes there can be questions to be answered in free form, i.e. with any text. A test quiz can only be answered by a pre-specified group of persons, the students in your class, for example. Immediately after submitting his/her answer each participant in the test gets a response indicating the number of correct answers and, depending on the quiz author, the percentage score for all questions (except those to be answered with any text). Being the quiz author, you can at any time get a summary of the results for all participants. In this any incorrect answers are displayed against the specified correct answers. Ofcourse, you also get the answers to the questions to be answered with any text, so that you can set the final score.

The easiest type of quiz to work with is the multiple-choice quiz (MC quiz). There are only two kinds of questions, those to be answered by clicking buttons, and those to be answered with any text. There are two kinds of click button questions depending on how many buttons can be clicked (down).

You can create MC quizzes which can be answered only by persons having a personal password and MC quizzes that can be answered by anybody with Internet access to the quiz. In the latter case you can specify whether answers should be registered so that you may inspect them; with no registration they simply serve as self test quizzes.

Finally, you can create questionnaires with QuizComposer. In fact, there is only very little difference between multiple-choice quizzes and questionnaires in QuizComposer, namely that the answers to questionnaires remain anonymous to the author/organizer. In other words, the organizer of a questionnaire survey is not able to see the identity of any answerer unless that identity is apparent from the answer of a question.
The identity of an answerer can never with all certainty be hided from the server administrator when the organizer has revealed the answerers password to the administrator. An answerer can only ensure his anonymity via a trusted intermediary between himself and the questionnaire organizer.

A quiz author can assemble one or more quizzes and questionnaires including all associated files (images etc.) in a pack. A pack can be made directly accessible for others on the Internet and/or stored on the authors local personal computer for later transfer to the same or another server, possibly via e-mail to another author. Therefore quizzes and questionnaires can easely be exchanged between persons and computers. Thus, a teacher need not write his/her own quizzes and questionnaires. They can come from other teachers, authorities, institutions or enterprises. In principle, anybody from scool children to grandparents can contribute if only they can use a PC and have access to somebody administering an Internet server with QuizComposer installed.

Project oriented education has gained a lot of popularity being well suited in subjects which do not demand high precision within factual knowledge. With QuizComposer teachers get a tool aiding them to teach subjects with hard facts. The students can labor with the quizzes at their own pace, at school or at home, possibly cooperating and with help only as needed.

Quizzes can be created in any language that can be understood by the quiz answerer and which can be used to enter verifiable answers. This is because the quiz author can specify all texts which the system must present to the answerer, e.g. a message stating how many answers were incorrect.

Presently the system can only be used by authors who master english or danish as all forms and guides are in these two languages only.

You can learn more about the possibilities offered by QuizComposer at introduction, where you can find more references.

You wish to organize a competition. You expect many participants, more than you have capacity for spacewise or with other resources. We are talking of a competition concerning knowledge that can be measured. Using QuizComposer you can organize a preliminary competition in which to sort out the best candidates for a final competition. You announce to all candidates, that at a certain date and hour there will be a test quiz for them to answer. You can read about testquizzes and "multiple-choice" quizzes above.

Apart from questions to be answered with numbers or text (character sequences fitting some pattern) or clicking of buttons you can define questions to be answered with any text for you to evaluate giving a broadere base for your judgement.

Above you can read more about being a quiz author or organizer.

Obviously, QuizComposer is suited for any kind of competition on factual knowledge, not only preliminary competitions.

This situation isn't much different from the one above for an organizer of a competition.

With a single or more test quizzzes you might be able to get an estimation concerning an applicants qualifications. By including questions to be answered with optional text you might also get an impression of other qualities possessed by an applicant before you call her/him in for an interview.

Notice that questionnaires and "multiple-choice"-quizzes can be phrased as psychological tests which may be anonymous or non-anonymous, see above.