Why replace?
Cirrus does not provide the desired workload reduction. For example, marking with multiple teachers at the same time is experienced as complicated and feedback to students cannot easily be reused. During the past years, requests to the supplier of Cirrus to improve functionalities were hardly responded to.
That is why, now that the contract with Cirrus will soon expire, a European Tender has taken place. This was won by the Delft company Ans.
Implementation Ans
Preparations for implementation are in full swing. In November the FCDTs will attend a Train-the-trainer training. And it is expected that the first pilot tests can take place in January.
This starts with one test per faculty each, with a maximum of 60 participants. Over the course of this academic year, this will be expanded to more tests and larger numbers of participants. As of September 2024 it is our goal to execute all of our digital exams with the new assessment software.
What happens to the current content?
At the moment a plan is being made for migration of the test questions from the Cirrus database to Ans. For FSW this comes down to approximately 35,000 questions!
This appears to be a very extensive job for support and we are investigating how this can best be tackled.
The FSW Examination Team will contact course coordinators in the coming period to discuss this. The intention is to make the transition as smooth as possible, with as little extra work as possible for the teachers.