I’ve been experimenting with ClassQuiz. This came to my attention earlier on in the year, though I can’t remember the context now, as an open source and free to use replacement for the likes of Kahoot and Wayground. I’ve finally had the chance to evaluate it over the past week to see if it’s suitable to recommend to others. The short answer is ‘yes!’, it’s good.
As mentioned, ClassQuiz is open source software and there are no ads or user tracking. That means that as well as using it from the main website, you can run it on your own server if you have a little technical knowledge using Docker Compose. There are no user limits, the usual ‘gotcha’ with freemium services. ClassQuiz has been tested with up to 300 simultaneous participants, but there is theoretically no limit. I imagine the only bottleneck would be server capacity.
I would say that it looks a little unpolished, but contrasted against the noise and clutter of Kahoot and that could be taken as a selling point. And I did encounter a few glitches and quirks. At the end of a quiz, after presenting, there is no option to exit the results slide and return to the Dashboard, so you have to manually edit the web address. I was also unable to log in with my email address, only my username.
Functionally, I found building quizzes as easy and straightforward as any other quiz tool. There are six question types, with up to four answers in the core MCQ. As a firm believer in learning by experience (in other words giving the thing a good poke), I did my classic of building out a Star Wars quiz using one of each question type to see how they work, and added images to each using both my own uploads and the Pixabay integration. Everything worked perfectly. Quizzes can be imported from Kahoot or Excel, and exported to Excel or ClassQuiz’s own format. After starting a quiz in a class setting participants can join using a code in any web browser or they can scan a QR code with their phone or tablet. All the functionality you would expect, and it all works pretty well. Now I just have to test it in the real world, probably the next time I run the session on gamification and game-based learning on my PG Cert module.
If you would like to play my Star Wars quiz, it is available here.
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