Academy Sectional Tests Beta Program

Thank you for kindly offering to participate in our beta test for Colony Sectional Tests. We very much appreciate any feedback you can provide during this beta program.

A Little Background

We recently moved to a new design for PerfectBee Academy (see here). At that time and as a temporary step, we paused our nine Academy Sectional Tests. Those tests are the focus of this beta program, before we bring them back online for all Colony members.

Timeline For Relaunch of Tests

We are planning a staggered return (for all Colony members) of the tests, one Academy course at a time. Here is our current schedule for tests being made available to all Colony members (this may change, depending on beta feedback).

Course 1: Learn About Bees Tests. March 31^st.
Course 2: Your Beehive Tests. April 7^th.
Course 3: A Healthy Beehive Tests. April 14^th.

Beta Program Timeline

We expect this beta program to be “short and sweet”. Specifically, have released the tests for Section 1.1: The Science of Bees and Section 1.2: The Life of Bees.

The test for Section 1.3: About Beekeeping will be available very soon and we will inform beta testers via email.

Improvements to The Test Experience

We are taking the opportunity to make the following changes to the test experience as compared to earlier versions.

We have removed the need to pass sectional tests to “unlock” the subsequent section. Colony members now have access to lessons and tests across all sections, as soon as they join Colony.
Members can now take sectional tests in any order.
We will be sending Certificates of Completion after members pass all three tests in a single course. For example, the three sectional tests in Course 1: Learn About Bees (Sections 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3) are passed we will send the certificate for that course*.
We previously presented the same set of questions in each test. This is changing and each test will now present a collection of questions (typically around 25 per test) from a “question bank”. This means the questions will change each time the test is taken.
The order of questions is also randomized.
The look and feel of the tests ie. the web page design will be improved (note: this is not complete yet and you will see changes during the beta program).

* Certificates will not be sent during the beta program.

Known Issues

The tests have the following current open issues (we plan to address these before launch).

There are significant changes to the styling (layout, colors, etc) to come.
We do not currently show the status of your last test attempt (pass/fail or score)
Certificates are not being sent at this time
After the last question in a test is submitted, there is a brief delay while your score is being calculated. There is no visual cue / indication at this time (so, please wait a bit!).

Getting Started

To access the first test, please ensure you are logged on with your Colony credentials and then head to PerfectBee Academy at https://dev.perfectbee.com/academy.

We won’t say more than that here – since we’re interested in your feedback (see “Feedback Requested” below).

Feedback Requested

Here is the feedback we request (though any and all feedback is most welcome). Please send your feedback to colony@perfectbee.com.

How easy was it to discover and access tests?
What did you think of the instructions presented before the first question?
How easy did you find it to navigate between questions?
What are your impressions of the layout of questions, the progress bar, next/previous options, etc (note: as above, this is something of a moving target)?
Was the results page clear and as expected?
What other comments or suggestions do you have?

Mark Williams

Founder, PerfectBee