Open Source Quia equivalent?

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Permalink Reply by Steve O'Connor on November 9, 2008 at 11:58am

Not what I am looking for, but it may work for others: Proprofs

It's free, looks nicer than Quia, and best of all you can embed it in your website or blog. In WordPress, I just toggled the text editor to html and pasted in the code. Very cool!

It does not have the ability to create classes and track student performance however.

Still looking for my own. Let's face it, after you create a lot of content, you lose it all if you let your Quia subscription expire. If Proprof goes out of business, then you are out of luck!

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Permalink Reply by Cindy Wright on November 9, 2008 at 7:03pm

Steve,
HotChalk will let you create an online class environment for free. You can set up classes, post announcements, assignments, give quizzes and tests, and manage it all through the online gradebook. It's not exactly a game environment like Quia, but a learning management system like Moodle.
You might want to check it out:
www.hotchalk.com

Cindy

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Permalink Reply by Steve O'Connor on November 11, 2008 at 9:18am

My BIG concern is data ownership.

Here's my concern with Quia. I pony up $49 and make scores of online learning activities. If I don't keep renewing, my quizzes and all my data entry work is gone. Essentially, my data is held hostage. If I put in a lot of work, I have to keep spending $49/yr.

With the freebies like ProProf and Hotchalk, what happens when they go out of business? Something increasingly likely these days. Investors and venture capitalists are growing reluctant to take chances be keeping these free services afloat. Alternatively, many have suddenly shifted business models abruptly (see edublogs) to a paid model.

I finally found my solution after many hours of searching. The free and open source solutions were clunky and more complex to install than I cared to bother with. Most had not been updated in quite awhile. Others just did not have the functionality that I was looking for.

I finally found a reasonably priced option that works on PC or Mac called Quiz Press for the same price as Quia for one year. It doesn't have all the options, but it creates paper, pdf, or web based quizzes. I already have the same company's crossword software, and just now realized that it makes interactive web based crossword puzzles.

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Permalink Reply by Charlie Wilken on November 20, 2011 at 3:43pm

      I use Quia and think it is a fantastic tool.  Having all the other teachers work makes it easily worth $49 per year.  My mostly at risk students love the challenging game like formats.  I think having 300 other science teachers helping me with my lesson plans is great!!!

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