Here's what one of our instructional librarians said in response to this:

"At the University of Arizona Libraries, we piloted WASSAIL in 2012. There were a number of usability issues. The user interface was not intuitive; you couldn't preview created question items without creating a test - I believe this has now been fixed; couldn't easily import questions into D2L (Desire2Learn); upgrades to the database were made infrequently, since there was only one technology staff assigned to the product. My advice would be to contact the tech staff for questions about the tech aspects of WASSAIL."

HTH,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael Schofield
Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2013 11:04 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] WASSAIL / Assessment Tools

Hey see-for-ehl,

It's still a year or two out, but re-accreditation awaits us at the end of the harrowing tunnel of library-work. One of my coworkers asked me to explore tools for assessment, linking me in example to WASAIL // Augustana Information Literacy from the University of Alberta (http://www.library.ualberta.ca/augustana/infolit/wassail/). I can't say that I'm particularly qualified to judge assessment tools and I was hoping you might have insight about WASSAIL or anything else.

My only real concern is that I don't want to adopt or force a tool that will only be a temporary stop-gap or will somehow be silo'd (siloed?) from the rest of our applications and content so I'd hope the tool would be versatile and easy to adapt so that we could truly integrate it. I can judge this part.

I don't know jack about assessment / assessment tools!

Michael Schofield(@nova.edu) | Web Services Librarian | (954) 262-4536 Alvin Sherman Library, Research, and Information Technology Center

// oh, and I write about the #libweb at www.ns4lib.com