Item Writing Campaign Management

About

Assessment organizations conduct item writing campaigns to fill their item inventory. A campaign typically lasts several months and will produce a few hundred new items, which must then be reviewed and approved for use in a test.

Prior to technological advances, campaigns were always face-to-face; assessment organization staff members and item writers gathered in a selected city. This type of campaign involved travel, lodging, and food arrangements requiring significant effort and expense.

Nowadays, face-to-face campaigns are being replaced by remote campaigns, in which the item writer works in their home or office on a schedule convenient for them. Remote campaigns eliminate all the logistical expenses and much of the labor required to set up face-to-face campaigns.

Pro! provides powerful features for remote item writing campaign management; it simplifies the recruiting and management of geographically dispersed item writers, which results in lower total item development costs.

Creating a Campaign

An authorized staff member of the assessment organization sets up a campaign. Setup is easy; it includes selecting the campaign’s start and end dates, choosing the item writing rules that will apply, identifying the item type (e.g. MCQ, HotSpot), and making a few other choices such as whether items can contain media, the maximum size of media, and so on. The next step is to choose the content classification to use for the campaign, which could be the current or future classification taxonomy. Afterward, Pro! calculates item shortfall by subtracting the desired inventory levels (maintained through Pro!’s item inventory management) from the count of items on hand at each point in the classification and displays the results. The campaign manager can then adjust the calculated values, using his or her knowledge of future events, to adjust the calculated need up or down.

Recruiting Item Writers

After a campaign is set up, it is time to invite item writers. Pro! has two ways to obtain potential item writers’ contact information: import of an Excel file or manual entry. Importing an Excel file is useful when the number of item writers is large, possibly in the thousands. Manual entry is appropriate when the number of item writers involved in a campaign is small or to add a few special invitees to the list imported from an Excel file. During manual entry, the campaign manager can enter the details for a new item writer or select for the project an item writer who participated in a previous campaign.

Sending Invitations

When the campaign manager triggers the feature, Pro! sends an invitational email to each prospective item writer imported into Pro! or manually added as described above. The email contains a link to a website and instructs the recipient to click on the link to accept or decline the invitation. Each item writer’s response is recorded in Pro!, and the campaign manager can view the lists of item writers who made a positive or negative response, or did not respond.

Conduct of a Campaign

On the campaign’s start date, Pro! sends a campaign-has-started email to item writers who agreed to participate, notifying them that they can begin writing items. Item writers write and submit items on a schedule that is convenient for them. Item writers can create and submit items until the campaign reaches its end date.

Email Contact

Keeping in contact with item writers throughout a campaign is important, and Pro! has integrated a mail service into campaign management for this purpose. The campaign manager can email item writers identified for the campaign throughout the campaign. These emails can be for any reason, but the usual purposes are to urge greater participation, notification of an impending close date, notification that a campaign has been extended or ended, and a thank you for their participation.

The mail service provides the campaign manager with the ability to enter a subject line and body text and to select the item writers who will receive the email individually or by category. A few of the categories available are all item writers who are participating, all who declined the invitation to participate, all who did not respond to the invitation, and so on.

Monitoring a Campaign

Pro! provides several features to help the campaign manager monitor progress. The first feature is a color tree map of content classifications. A tree map displays hierarchical (tree-structured) data, like a table of contents, for example, as a set of nested, colored rectangles. The size of each rectangle indicates the number of items ordered as a percent of the total campaign, and the color indicates the degree of completion of those items. Red indicates 0% complete, green indicates 100%, and colors between red and green indicate the degree of completion between 0% and 100%. Text inside each rectangle gives the content classification code and the count of items ordered vs. completed for the content classification that the tree map represents. The following illustration shows a sample tree map.

INSERT BETTER PICTURE OF TREE MAP

The second feature is various charts showing daily progress. There is, for example, a chart showing the number of items submitted each day of the campaign.

The third feature is a viewable, exportable tabular display of the count of items submitted to date by each participating item writer.

Modifying, Extending, or Ending a Campaign

Once a campaign has started, the campaign manager can add more content classifications, increase or decrease the number of items ordered for a given content classification, set the end date to an earlier or later date, and add more item writers. The item type ordered for the campaign cannot change, nor can the item writing rules selected for the campaign. Item writers can submit items that were in progress after the campaign ends but cannot start new items. Additional item writers do not automatically receive an invitational email; the campaign manager must trigger the invitation.

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