From regular people to big corporations, everyone is doing it or has done it at some point. But not all platforms are cost-effective. So today, we’ll try and help you find the best alternatives for online test centers in 2022.
The Internet era has revolutionized different industries and has introduced a digital practice widely known as eLearning. The beneficial impact of eLearning is shown by market research prediciting an astonishing market value growth from $9.2 billion in 2018 to $ 22.4 billion by 2023.[1]
The North American market is deemed as more receptive and inclined to the implementation of eLearning. The U.S and Canada are believed to have intergrated LMS systems with the aim of ensuring the improvement of educational methods. A traditional approach to learning processes are not suitable for today’s students/employees; contemporary solutions are a mandatory in facilitating the required knowledge/skills, especially for tech-savvy generations. The education industry must keep up with the needs of the youth – interactive approaches while pursuing knowledge.
Various reasons have driven the escalation in value including the necessity to educate and train a large number of people in an efficient and convenient matter, less time-consuming training sessions (the Brandon Hall Group’s HCM Outlook Survey[2] conducted in 2017 noted that eLearning can decrease employee training time up to 60% as the process is performed directly at the workplace. Globalization has caused a significant increase in employee training and established constant development as a modern principle. Versatility is a core feature of eLearning as it enables customization of different learning/testing requirements. Companies have realized the flexibility eLearning provides and as a result, 72%[3] of firms believe this is the main factor in outperforming business competitors.
The dynamic nature of modern businesses combined with the fast-paced market represents a serious issue among employers. The eLearning methodology ensures keeping the employees up to date with the latest trends and requires an effective solution which provides continuity in gaining current knowledge. Being perceptive to rapid changes dictated by digitalization is an imperative in the workplace of the 21st century.
In addition, eLearning is an adequate solution for the more introvert employees. Simultaniously, trainees are more likely to avoid uncomfortable situations if they fail to answer a question or present a solution fit for a particular business problem. The key to eLearning implementation is adaptation to the needs of employees/students (digital learning will eventually become the primary approach in education).
As a result of the eLearning market expansion, learning management systems (the power systems behind eLearning) have proven to be crucial in the expansion of digital learning in diverse industries: government institutions, startups, enterprises etc. LMS is a software application based on web technology for creating specific content, evaluating user performance and managing the learning process. Scalable results, tracking and reporting is automatic and in real time.
Driven by the progress in eLearning, YouTestMe was created as a innovative software testing platform delivering numerous features and options suitable for both corporate and academic learning/training:
Test Creation,
Test Management
Test-taking,
Item Authoring
A Sophisticated Reporting System
Automated Certification
Automated Proctoring
API
Safe Exam Environment
We encourage you to check out the YouTestMe products:
References:
[1] https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/learning-management-systems-market-1266.html
[2] https://www.brandonhall.com/blogs/brandon-hall-group-research-published-june-5-june-11/
[3] https://elearningindustry.com/top-elearning-statistics-2019
The duty of a human resources manager is to make sure that the company’s workforce is filled with capable, resourceful employees that can get their jobs done in accordance with the needs of the company itself. To achieve this, employees often need to be given a very specific kind of training in order to get the abilities needed to do their job correctly. Therefore, it’s up to HR to develop an adequate training program that can offer this to the employees, but constructing such a program and putting it into practice is by no means an easy feat.
Pre-employment testing is an essential part of making sure that you have a capable, resourceful workforce that can pull off any tasks that are required of them during their time in the company. If you just accept an employee before first assessing their abilities, there’s a good chance that you are going to end up with an incompetent worker – a sure-fire way for the company to lose money. When it comes to employees, you definitely want to make sure that you are getting the best that you can.
Obviously, this can only be efficiently done by constructing a test that is capable of gauging an employee’s abilities properly, so that you and everybody else at the company know what they can expect from the employee, and (possibly even more important) what they cannot expect. Creating such a test can be hard work, and for years people have relied on the good old, tried, pen and paper approach; the applicant would get a piece of paper with a list of various questions and queries that they needed to answer to the best of their ability, and then wait a while for the tests to go through the long and tedious process of manual evaluation.
This approach is tried and it works to an extent, but nowadays thanks to the advent of modern technology, people are coming up with better and more efficient solutions for testing in the form of testing software. In this article, we want to discuss what you can gain from switching to a pre-employment testing software solution such as GetCertified, and why it’s a step up from the conventional method of testing.
Testing is a process that involves gathering and processing a lot of information – not only do you have to evaluate the tests themselves, but there is also the employee’s CV and background to consider. If you have a large number of applicants, this can be very tedious and take a really long time as long as you’re using the manual approach. Every paper has to be looked at separately and read with maximum focus, which can be both tiring and inefficient if a human has to perform this task. If you use employee training software to aid you in this endeavor, however, it’s a completely different story.
Modern computers can perform billions of operations in a single second, which means that it takes milliseconds for them to grade and evaluate a 50-question test, which is basically instant. This means that the number of applicants is no longer a factor, so you don’t have to limit yourself in that fashion – anyone can take the test, and only those who are deemed competent enough by the software will be allowed to pass.
Another problem with the manual evaluation of pre-employment tests is us humans’ natural tendency to be biased. Objectivity has long been a problem with tests, not only in the realm of pre-employment testing but virtually in any situation where one has to take a test. It doesn’t matter how much we pride ourselves on objectivity, even if the tests are completely random we are still subject to a certain amount of bias. A computer program is another story entirely, as it functions based on logic alone and is incapable of being subjective in any way. This is a sure-fire way to make sure that the results you get from your employees are truly a precise evaluation of their abilities, so you perfectly know what they’re capable of and how they can benefit the company.
Apart from the ability to be objective, humans are also not really that good at performing repetitive tasks with equal focus over long periods of time. This is why there are lots of accidents on assembly lines or in any other field that requires people to spend their time doing tedious tasks, and it’s even worse when those tasks, apart from being repetitive, also require a great deal of focus at all times. A test is a perfect example of this because the questions are always the same, but the answers are slightly different every time. And after grading fifty or a hundred tests, one really tends to lose their focus and this can lead to mistakes in the evaluation process itself, making it less precise. A program doesn’t get fatigued in this manner, so it’s the perfect replacement for the human mind for such a task. It will stick to its given algorithm 100 percent of the time, no matter how many tests it evaluates, and this is priceless when you want to get precise information from the testing material.
Finally, it’s important to mention how pre-employment testing software can make the entire evaluation process much more convenient for both the tester and the tested. Applicants can perform tests from the comfort of their own homes, and all you have to do is send them a link via email and they can get to work right away. This is a huge step up from the conventional approach where all the applicants have to be in the same room at the same time. By using software-based solutions, they can simply perform the test at their leisure, and as soon as they’re done you instantly get their results and can contact them regarding the additional steps they need to take. It’s not only a great way to speed up the process, but it makes it far more flexible as well.
There are many more advantages that you can gain from using a software-based pre-employment testing solution, but we think that these four are sufficient for now. Pen-and-paper has been around a long time and it has served us well, but its time is at definitely at an end. Automated testing is the future, and if this type of software keeps evolving, sooner or later it’s going to be the only logical choice.
The human resource department is perhaps one of the most vital parts of any company – they’re the guys tasked with managing any and all of the information that has to do with the employees themselves. Redistributing the workforce, recruiting new workers, evaluating the performance of existing ones, developing public relations – these are just some of the tasks that the HR department has to deal with on a daily basis. These are not easy tasks by any means, and the more a company grows, the more the human resources department will have its hands full with various responsibilities.
One of the most important obligations tasked to an HR manager is, as we already mentioned, recruiting new employees and testing the various skills and abilities that they’ll be needing once they get to work and start contributing to the company. And to effectively gauge an employee’s skill, it is absolutely paramount that a good test is constructed. Otherwise, you basically have no idea if your employees are capable of performing their tasks at a satisfactory level.
Learning how to create a good test is a skill that takes time to develop, and it’s not something that anyone can do. If a person working in HR is going to be responsible for testing new employees and educating them, however, then that is one of the skills that they themselves should definitely possess. This is where knowledge testing software comes in. Nowadays, technology has advanced enough to allow the process of test creation, as well as the process of testing itself to be partly automated, which can make things a whole lot easier for the person constructing the test.
Creating tests is a tedious process that can sometimes take up a lot of resources, and using automated testing software for this purpose can help you greatly cut down on the resources needed. This is because automating any process makes it more efficient by default. Having a computer do most of your work for you means that existing employees can focus on tasks that are more important and require human intervention, while the software takes care of the most tedious parts of the test creation process.
Normally, performing test creation by hand and putting those tests into practice can cost HR a lot of extra money over the years, but with a good testing app like our Get Certified all you have to do is conduct a single payment of $6,900 and you’re all set.
Automating a process of any kind, no matter what it is, means that it is getting conducted much faster than any human could ever dream of achieving. Modern computer processors can perform billions of operations in a single second, and this kind of processing power can really help you save time and energy when creating tests and having people take them. No more printing copies, sorting through the answers, performing statistical analyses of the results – the computer can do all of that for you, providing that it has all the necessary built-in features to do so.
The biggest advantage is quite possibly the fact that, when you use automated testing software, all the information you require is in one place, where you can easily look it up and access it whenever you need it. If the user interface is friendly and intuitive it’s very easy to do this in very little time.
When dealing with an automated knowledge testing software, the testing process itself can afford to be far more sophisticated, and return better and more precise results about how capable your employees are. Gauging their abilities in this way will help you get a better idea of what “resources” you have at your disposal, and once you have that sort of information it makes it much easier to make decisions based on those resources. Both new and existing employees should be tested on a regular basis, and implementing automatic testing software to do this instead of you can make the situation a whole lot easier – both for you, and your employees.
Knowledge testing software can not only gauge how capable an employee is, but it can also give you a pretty good idea about in which environment their skills will be of most use. This means that you’ll be able to more quickly and much more efficiently conduct any team placement, and successfully redistribute your employees so their abilities will be able to get taken advantage of as much as possible. Good team building is absolutely essential to a functional workforce, and by utilizing automated knowledge testing software you can make even this process far more efficient and less tedious.
One of the most common concerns that a lot of people have when using software-based solutions to emulate and take over conventional tasks is security – specifically speaking, whether all the information fed to the software will end up in the wrong hands in the event of a hacker attack. The good news is that, even though this information is shared online to make it easily accessible to anyone who needs to access it, it’s also pretty easy to protect the information from people who don’t need to access it.
With GetCertified, for example, our experienced team of developers is constantly patching and upgrading the security system built into the software, in order to minimize the risk of a potential security breach that can prove catastrophic to a company.
As you can see, there are many reasons why you should consider using knowledge testing software in an HR department, as it can make your work more efficient, quicker and create less hassle for all. If you haven’t already opted out for a knowledge testing solution, we highly advise that you do so as it is really a night and day difference when you have some help from automated, dedicated software to do the most tedious parts of your job for you.
Driving schools are constantly facing with the need for testing of its students. This can be a big cost for driving schools, because most of them are still using the traditional way of testing, paper-based testing.
If you are told that the procedure of passing the driving test here is simple, they have informed you wrong. Maybe the test won’t be that hard, if you study, but until you have reached them, there is a lot of paper work to be done.
The first thing you do is go to a licensed driving school and pick up the necessary forms there. The forms are then taken to a licensed eye doctor where you need to be examined and the forms fulfilled, of course. The next station is medical doctor. He also has to fill in the forms. Every form filled in is being paid. That is when you go to the driving school to take lessons. Then you are being scheduled the test. In case you have failed the test, you have to pay to do it again, as well as you have paid it for the first time. It seems to be a normal thing for them, but everywhere in the world, it sounds strange, but it is simply their way of doing thing.
Driving Test Complete is easily the most comprehensive PC software of its kind. Includes all the Official DVSA questions, answers, explanations, case studies, hazard clips and full driving test plus lots more.
This product offers you hundreds of Hazard Perception Test clips to practice on with comprehensive tutorials and videos on how to make your first test your last. Includes the 26 Official DVSA sample clips.
No other product offers an interactive learn to drive program that shows you step by step how to develop your skills using LDCs highly acclaimed LD System of driving tuition.
No other product offers a more accurate video of a full driving test.
Professional voice-over is used extensively throughout the product for help, information, learning notes, tutorials, animations, video, questions, answers, explanations and hint advice.
The Product is made up of 8 distinct programs: Theory Test program (consisting of many different parts such as information module, learning module, exam testing module and review), Hazard Perception program (consisting of information learning module, exam testing module and practice learning module), Learning to drive program, Show me Tell me program, Practical Driving Test program, Highway Code plus program and many others.
One more advantage of using this software is that no one should wait for the results any more, they would be known almost instantly.
Since government seems to search for the profit all the time, here is the way. A lot of certificates can be given in no time. Both future drivers and the government would be satisfied. They shall briefly think about that as a serious project since we have already gone through a lot of them.
Losing the license, it happens all the time to many people. The thing is that when they lose it, it is not being registered anywhere so it repeats constantly, without even being noticed. This changes things a bit. Everything is being recorded so if someone has lost it, it will be seen in the system that he has been looking for another one. This method can make you realize who the reckless drivers are. And, on the other hand maybe it will make them keep their things better and in a safer place. This will also save time to both them and you.
What would be even better than this is? Integration. This means that everything can be found in one and a same place. There can be included insurance, car companies and all the things connected to this. This will prevent both drivers from wasting time while going to a lot of different places gathering all the necessary things they need. It will also make everything go faster and there would not be needed for the crowd to be made.
YouTestMe Get Certified is a perfect solution for driving schools that have a constant need of testing and certification.
Virtual learning environments include computers and the internet as well as tools offered by it in the classroom. They are used to make students interested in a specific subject or topic and also make them bring better results in the end. Many tools are offered by this new software which can both save time on doing necessary things in class and make productivity better.
Little known fact: employee training is not just for quiz makers and private companies! Government training and state testing are also important on a much larger scale. It just so happens that the private sector is not the only one in need of skilled workforce. Regardless of what you may have heard about government employees in general, they too need to educate and better themselves and there are all sorts of things about employee training that agencies have yet to learn, in addition to those they have reluctantly adopted.
When was the last time anyone has heard of a budget increase for a government institution, other than in times of a huge national crisis? And when was the last time somebody working for the government got in front of a camera and started talking about pending budget cuts? You’ve heard a lot more of the latter, and this is kind of endemic in most countries. On the one hand, we have people who are supposed to be in charge of things of extreme importance like making and enforcing laws and policies. On the other, many of these agencies could not even pass the regulatory inspection that they themselves condone, support or are trying to enforce.
It is the equivalent of seeing a police car parked on a spot reserved for people with handicaps. In fact, even when these agencies do decide to modernize, it is hastily executed and any subsequent updates are sketchy at best. At worst, they are nonexistent, and it puts us all at risk. The list of things they should be doing but aren’t is almost as long as the list of excuses they have come up with to counter them. It seems policy updates seem to reach the general public faster than they do the people who are supposed to be acting upon them.
There are people whose jobs involve risking their lives or saving other people, and you kind of need them to take regular competency tests, like paramedics and cops. Seeing an overweight cop or a soldier has long since stopped to phase anyone. Instead of enforcing rules and regulations, the military is figuring out ways for overweight people and those who would otherwise fail at the physical to be allowed in because they lack the manpower as well as the resources to hire professionals. Or people manning nuclear silos being forced to use those huge floppy disks from the ’70s.
Or something as trivial as waiting in line for a new photo ID because of “system failure” or some software update. It is scary when regular people have more technology at their disposal than government officials and workers.
Employee training software has been around for years, and not just as a concept. In some instances, it is literally the same software but at least some of it comes from a time when the priorities were still straight. When using any kind of software, the age-old fear of a catastrophic failure that would leave millions of people in distress and other reliability issues are still relevant even to this day. Aside from that, they need something that can be quickly applied all across the country. If it takes too long to create universal tests and organize groups, this simply will not do. The more versatile, the better. If it is automatic, this would be just swell. When your tests are of pen and paper variety, there are numerous issues from lack of standardization, to fear of cheating and don’t even get us started on the grading process. With computer tests, everything is done automatically, with a push of a button. Except for filling out the blank spaces – that is for the trainees, of course. The efficiency is vastly superior in almost every way, except when you want to grade an essay or something like that. But even that is easier to do in an electronic form. The only people who are against this are the old-fashioned employees who are scared of technology.
As with most things, safety is going to be a serious issue. Those urban myths about 14-year-olds with laptops emailing nuclear launch codes to Pentagon may be exaggerated, but they illustrate the core issue. They have a lot to learn from companies and sites such as Oracle, whose databases tend to be the most secure of them all. Additional safety measures need to be applied and they need to be constantly updated as any government site is under threat these days.
As we have mentioned, the best case scenario would be the possibility to merge databases and share software between different agencies and similar departments. For instance, giving police access to the driving test database might even save some lives on the long run, but the potential for abuse also increases with every such “solution”. As much as we all want a “one size fits all” solution, it could not possibly be available right now. Or could it be?
One of the solutions that could fit the needs of employees training in government institutions is YouTestMe Get Certified. Get Certified allows instructors to generate tests and create custom designed certificates for employees and significantly reduce employee training costs.
This is an entirely web-based learning platform, and it covers all aspects of the educational process. Of course, all of these aspects are digital. All of the participants are organized into virtual groups, and they have to share their resources and interact with one another. Just like in a normal classroom, except there is not a single physical location they have to be present.
As knowledge management becomes one of the key areas for future development, experts still debate the merits of traditional testing and compare it to the computer-based one. Whether it comes to making adjustments to the Learning Management System (LMS), or testing solutions regarding Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), some people still prefer the old ways over the new. This position is understandable, but it is also important to take an objective view of the current situation and make plans for the future.
It goes without saying that the traditional, paper-based approach is by far more users across the board. Due to its low cost, ubiquitous status, and the fact that it has been proven in action time and time again, a lot of people prefer it over the uncertain, costly alternative that is CBT. However, times are changing, and those that fail to keep up will be left behind. With that in mind, CBT has been gaining in popularity as a knowledge management tool, especially over the last decade. The sheer amount of research on this topic has been growing at an exponential rate, but conclusions are still… inconclusive.
The thing is, technology is developing at such a rapid pace that studies and their findings cease to be relevant in a matter of years, so a lot of the initial studies have been rendered inconsequential a long time ago. Besides, the computer experience an average candidate has nowadays is vastly different from what it would have been a decade ago, or what it will be a decade from now. However, if there is a general consensus on this issue, at least when it comes to studies conducted within the last three years or so, it would be that there is no major difference between CBT and PBT, as the difference is smaller than 0.05%. Of course, this may change in the future.
As technology advances, so do the testing methods, even at lower education levels – not to mention companies. For one, computers and tablets have been present in most schools for years, in some form or another. The increased level of interaction between students and teachers has also resulted in additional testing methods, that are done via computers and other devices. At the university level, many institutions resort to OpenCourseWare (OCW), Google Classroom, or similar solutions for knowledge management problems.
As for companies and solutions aimed primarily at adults, we can see an ever-increasing use of social networks for educational purposes. The potential to adopt knowledge from one’s peers as well as its success rate has not gone unnoticed. Webcams, whiteboards, and screencasting have all found their uses in this area as well.
Each of them has certain benefits over the other. For instance, the cost of paper-based testing is essentially boiled down to a sheet of paper and the person in charge of monitoring the exam, whereas computer-based testing requires electricity, computers, and other means that make the initial costs much higher. On the other hand, it is a lot easier to implement en masse and is arguably much safer in terms of administration. Then again, it all depends on the level of measures implemented against cheating and the level of commitment on behalf of those being examined.
In the long run, however, CBT does involve a number of advantages. For one, exams do not need to be shipped to a physical location, so there should be no delays or associated costs. Simple encryption should keep away most troublemakers. Most importantly, scoring is a lot faster in this regard, as everything is done electronically. The probability of human error is much lower as well. One downside is that this only applies to certain types of tests, so scoring essays in this manner is still far too good to be true. PBT will most likely remain in use, at least on some level – until CBT technology has advanced enough to take over entirely.
Before introducing a virtual learning environment, many institutions specializing in education such as Cambridge were beyond reach to the overwhelming majority of people. After all, you can only fit so many people inside a classroom at one time. However, after making the switch to include advanced technologies complete with CBT, the overall level of education has increased dramatically. This is a life-changing opportunity for people who could not afford to study at a prestigious university due to lack of funds or because they have to support their families. In the future, however, most universities will offer their services online in one form or another, while maintaining the regular, physical lessons to those who can afford them.
From language teaching to gaining new skills, various companies all around the world have resorted to this kind of knowledge management for their employees, especially in the IT sector. The ability to create a universal test, translate it into a number of languages, and conduct it simultaneously in several different countries has not gone unnoticed by major companies. There are even companies that specialize in conducting computer-based testing and offering their services to schools and businesses alike.
YouTestMe recognized the potential of improving modern ways of testing and developed two knowledge testing platforms that are very competitive in today’s e-learning market. The first solution is Classroom 2020, a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that offers a wide set of features bound to improve the quality of lecturing and testing. It was designed for schools, colleges public, and government institutions. The second solution, Get Certified, a quiz maker and certification platform, answers to the constant requirement of employee training and certification. But those are only a few features that our products have. Feel free to sign up for free demos of Classroom 2020 and Get Certified to see for yourself all of the advantages of modern knowledge testing solutions.
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