One of the things that distinguishes Yacapaca from other eLearning systems is the astonishing amount of high-quality assessment content that is available, completely free, to all users of the system. As of this evening, we have 4,411 courses containing 8,717 automarked quizzes and 4,080 writing tasks.
But until now, we have hidden all thus under a bushel called “login”. Only members could see it, and there was little incentive to become a member because you didn’t know what was available.
Finally, that’s changed. The content has moved outside the ‘login wall’, and the login itself has been moved to the top of the page.
In fact, we have gone one step further. New users can set assignment for their students without creating an account at all. The system will create an access key for the students (so they don’t need logins) and a temporary login for the teacher to pick up the results. This does not give all the privileges of a full account, but it can be upgraded when the teacher gains confidence in the system.
One limitation we had to introduce was to hide quiz answers. It’s now easy for a student to find a quiz in the content repository, so to prevent cheating we hide the answers in quiz previews. That’s a little frustrating for a teacher discovering the system for the first time, but I really can’t see any way around it.
So, if you want to show colleagues some particular course or quiz on Yacapaca, you can now simply copy the page url and send it to them. If we have done our job properly, your colleague will immediately see how to use it with their own students. When they see their students’ responses to the system, I think they will become converts.
Yacapaca 