on sale....

It's interesting each year to look at the types of companies and organisations that have their stalls at this event. It isn't always easy to see whether there is any particularly dominant theme, but you do tend to see clusters of product types. For example in the past you would see a number of LMS/VLE companies flogging their wares and scowling at one another. Apart from the now ritual Fronter-Blackboard banter, that seems to have faded a little. There was a time when lots of universities and start-ups would be championing their own custom-built tools. On that side of things this year, it looks like two topics for small startup style companies are either :(a) lecture/presentation recording or (b) online assessment/quiz tools. Indeed, I'm not sure when I last saw so many variants of quiz tools, everything from Countdown/Who wants to be a millionaire to military style, punctuated testing regimes. Can't see much of a market there for all these players and don't know how they'd stack up against the bigger products that have been on the go. Of course, many of them have their own distinctive features and are clearly a labour of love on the part of the developers, but sadly in this competitive area that's not the key criterion for market success. Indeed in the current economic conditions it is likely that institutions are going to be a bit more conservative in their purchasing and stick with the usual suspects.

Of course, a few more open source solutions might help, but then for official high-stakes examinations, would you be willing to go out on a limb in terms of security and potential hacks?