Digital exam platform: should you ‘build’ or ‘buy’?
In today’s digital era, organizations are looking for efficient ways to streamline their evaluation and certification processes. With the rise of digital exam platforms, the question arises: should you make your own platform or opt for a ready-made solution? Let us delve deeper into the advantages and drawbacks of both options so you can make a well-informed decision.
Building your own exam platform
Advantages
- Customisation: Building your own exam platform allows you to tailor it to your specific needs and requirements. From features and functionalities to user interface and design, you have complete autonomy to create a solution that perfectly aligns with your particular needs.
- Full control: You can add new features and expand capacity as needed without relying on external vendors.
- Budget allocation: In some organisations, the budgets for ‘Build’ (in house) or ‘Buy’ (external) are in different departments and have an impact on the project’s feasibility. This means that it could be more interesting to build the exam platform with some in house developers.
Disadvantages
- Resources: Creating a robust and reliable platform requires a significant investment of time, money, and expertise. From assembling a team of skilled functional analysts, designers, testers, project managers and developers to overcoming technical hurdles and ensuring data security, the journey from conception to implementation can be arduous and demanding.
- Technical challenges: Building a secure exam platform entails overcoming various technical challenges such as ensuring data privacy, preventing cheating and exam fraud, and maintaining system reliability, scalability, etc.
- Long-term maintenance and support: Once the platform is deployed, the burden of maintaining, updating, and providing support remains on your institution’s shoulders. This necessitates a continuous investment of resources and efforts to ensure that the platform remains operational, secure, and user-friendly over time, and that the technology remains up-to-date.
Buying an existing “off the shelf” solution
Advantages
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- Development time and cost: Opting for a ready-made exam platform saves you the time and effort required for development. You can quickly deploy the solution and start using it, thereby reducing time to market and allowing you to focus on your core activities without delay.
- Proven reliability: Established exam platforms have undergone rigorous testing and are used by numerous institutions worldwide. This track record should give you confidence in their reliability and performance.
- Long-term maintenance and support: Most vendors offer ongoing support, updates, and maintenance for their platforms. You can rely on their expertise to address any issues and stay up-to-date with the latest features.
- Scalability: Off-the-shelf solutions often come with scalability options, allowing you to adjust resources and features based on your evolving needs.
- New features: Vendors of off-the-shelf solutions continuously scan the market for the latest trends and problems to be solved. This implicates that new features will become available for you, often as part of your subscription cost.
- API integrations: Well-built exam platforms have an underlying API that enables you to set up a wide range of integrations and automations with your own existing processes and systems.
Disadvantages
- Limited customisation: While vendors may provide some degree of flexibility, off-the-shelf platforms are inherently designed to cater to a broad range of users and may not fully align with your institution’s specific requirements. You may have to adapt your processes to fit the platform’s functionalities. Alternatively, the vendor’s experts can guide you through the implementation process, making sure the platform comes as close as possible to your requirements.
- Dependency: Relying on a third-party vendor means you are subject to their pricing updates, service interruptions, and long-term evolution the product.
- Lock in: The ‘buy’ decision may go together with the fear of being stuck in the external platform. The idea that you will never be able to migrate to another solution, if you are no longer satisfied with the platform. Check with you vendor about the exit or migration strategy. These days there are multiple options to change with international standards like QTI.
Conclusion
The decision to build or buy a digital exam platform requires careful consideration of several factors, including budget, timeline, customisation needs, and technical expertise. While building your own platform will offer you ultimate control and customisation freedom, it will require significant investments and long-term commitments. Purchasing a solution “off the shelf”, on the other hand, typically provides more convenience, reliability, and support but may entail compromises in customisation.
