The Pustulka Project. Developing Online Testing Software for English for Specific Purposes.

On 21 April 2018, the third day of IABL 2018 World Conference I had a pleasure to present PUSTULKA (pustulka.edu.pl/) – a new web-based testing software, developed specially for the ESP context, and created by me  – an ESP teacher, together with a software developer. It emerged when the quest for ideal testing software for FLT turned out to be unsuccessful.

With PUSTULKA teachers can create a variety of exercises (including cloze texts, multiple choice, drop-down lists, checkboxes, short and long answers), build tests out of the exercises, assign them online or print as WORD documents. Exercises are easily and quickly parsed (i.e. transferred) from plain text editors (e.g. Word or notepad) to PUSTULKA and the teachers do not need to have the knowledge of html or programming to manage.

PUSTULKA works in all browsers and on all devices and students do not need to create accounts to do the tests. They can view their score and answers immediately after submission. They can also e-learn with PUSTULKA by doing the exercises which teachers make public. There is already a collection of public exercises for you to test on: pustulka.edu.pl/PublicExercise/PublicExercisesList

Students’ satisfaction survey proved that PUSTULKA fulfilled its task of developing a user-friendly application. 91% of users had definitely or rather positive experience with this application.

The hidden agenda of the Project is to build a teachers’ Community of Practice[1] by inducing collaboration among them. Ideally, teachers will contribute high quality content to the application and share some of their exercises with other contributors. Teachers can comment on other teacher’s exercises, indicate the possibilities of modification or correct mistakes, etc. In this way teachers will benefit from the growing database of exercises, simplify their own and one another’s work, save time on designing and evaluating tests as well as develop their digital competence.

If you are interested in learning more about how to create exercises, assign tests, see a sample test or set up a free trial account, go to PUSTULKA Help section on: pustulka.edu.pl/Home/Help

We will be happy to hear your feedback. You can contact us via PUSTULKA web page or directly on info@pustulka.edu.pl

[1] Communities of Practice (CoPs) refer to groups of people who genuinely care about the same real-life problems or hot topics, and who on that basis interact regularly to learn together and from each other.

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