eCollege AU+ Offers Offline Exam Building Capabilities For Faculty
eCollege Leverages .NET Technologies to Enable Integration
with Respondus for More Convenient Exam Authoring
DENVER – October 2, 2002 – eCollege(SM) [Nasdaq: ECLG], a leading provider of technology and services for online higher education programs, today announced a partnership with Respondus, an innovative leader of offline assessment software. The partnership marks eCollege’s first third-party web services integration following last week’s announcement highlighting the company’s commitment to Microsoft .NET technologies for greater interoperability.
The partnership will enable faculty members to build exams offline through Respondus’ newest version, V2.0 Beta, and simply upload the exams into their eCollege AU+(SM) online courses. This web service integration approach, unique to eCollege among leading course management system (CMS) providers, integrates Respondus functionality with eCollege’s own Exam Builder Plus(SM) features, allowing educators to access these same features offline from their desktop. This allows for faster and easier creation and management of exams, and enables faculty to import exam questions from other sources, including other leading CMS courses.
“This integration with Respondus is significant on two fronts – first, it demonstrates the benefit of .NET technologies by combining the Web with the sophistication of a desktop client, and second, it begins a longer term path for eCollege to offer more of its functionality in an offline mode,” said Mark Resmer, chief technology officer of eCollege. “As an important long term product direction, offline functionality brings more convenience to users when they cannot be connected to the Web, and also very importantly, helps overcome bandwidth issues that may sometimes limit efficiency when working online.”
“We are pleased to bring our offline exam building applications to eCollege,” said David Smetters, president of Respondus. “Our software will ideally complement eCollege’s teaching platform, giving educators greater access to the tools they are already comfortable using.”
eCollege has implemented a set of web services that leverage open XML standards, and use the standard .NET support for SOAP services. This allows the Respondus software to:
· Connect to the eCollege system,
· Authenticate the faculty member,
· Obtain a list of the courses the specific faculty member teaches,
· Find a list of the exams within a selected course,
· Pull the contents of a selected exam, and
· Push the edited contents back to the eCollege system.
The user interface (UI) is exposed by the Respondus client application, so that it appears to be a simple desktop application that automatically talks to the eCollege system.
A Respondus V2.0 Beta will be available in October for integration with the eCollege system. Users will be able to download it from the Respondus website (www.Respondus.com) for free during the beta release.
About Respondus, Inc.
Respondus, Inc. is a software application company specializing in testing, assessment, and survey tools for the eLearning market. Thousands of instructors at over 2,000 colleges and universities in over 50 countries use Respondus software to enhance the capabilities of their course management systems. Respondus, Inc. also licenses its “next generation” test bank software to publishing companies and offers supporting services. For more information, visit www.Respondus.com.
About eCollege
eCollege [Nasdaq: ECLG] is a leading eLearning technology and services provider to educational markets. eCollege designs, builds and supports high quality online degree, certificate/diploma and professional development programs for colleges, universities, school districts and state departments of education. eCollege’s clients include such institutions as National University; University of Massachusetts Amherst; University of Colorado; Drexel University; DeVry University, Inc.; New England College of Finance; and the Kentucky Virtual High School. The company was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Denver. For more information, visit www.eCollege.com.
This news release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the securities laws. These statements are based on management’s current expectations and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks. Actual results may differ materially. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from estimates or projections contained in the forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, the possibility of our network infrastructure and computer systems failing; the performance and limitations another company’s software; our ability to successfully integrate third party software; future technological advances by our competitors; and such other factors as are discussed in our most recent Form 10-K Annual Report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), which you are encouraged to review in connection with this release. We believe that these forward-looking statements are reasonable, however, you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which are based on current expectations and speak only as of the date of this release. We are not obligated to publicly release any revisions to forward-looking statements to reflect events after the date of this release.
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