iQuiz for the iPod as a training tool

One of the things I am most interested in when it comes to eLearning is eLearning content that is developed for portable devices such as the iPod. I was pretty excited when I saw that iTunes launched iTunes University.

Well, a new game has been developed by Apple called iQuiz, which is a trivia game for the iPod. It allows you to play downloaded “trivia packs” on the iPod.

So you can create these “trivia packs” for your learners so that they can take your quizzes on their iPods. Cool, huh?

What I like about it:

• The UI – The games look and feel is cool. Really feels like you are playing a game. The animations are really slick as well.
  
• Ability to create timed quizzes
• 3 strikes your out – Some of the quizzes have a “loose” value. A loose value is the number of wrong answers that result in losing the game

Unfortunately there are a couple of things that prevent this from becoming a really effective tool for deploying eLearning material:

• No way to capture results – This makes it an ineffective tool at it as tool for assessing student retention of information. It would be nice if users could take the quiz, and then have the results uploaded to a database or LMS when the user synchronized their iPod.
  
• No way to provide custom feedback – Only default feedback is displayed (correct/incorrect). So it is difficult to use quizzes as an effective tool.
• End user must have iQuiz installed - Which means any user who wants to take your quizzes will have to have iQuiz installed.
• Installing the quizzes is not intuitive - Quizzes need to be copied to the \My Music\iTunes\iPod Games\iQuiz folder, and there is no ability to manage your quizzes in iTunes.

So basically the game is more about trivia than it is quizzing. But anyways, I think the program is interesting, and in a follow-up blog post I will post instructions for how you can create quizzes (trivia packs) for iQuiz, and instructions on how you can copy the quizzes to your iPod.

Learn more about the iPod in Education.

iQuiz for the iPod.