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Investigate Educational Technologies :: Complimentary Tools

StudyMate Author

About StudyMate Author

"Training Made Fun with StudyMate Author" by Stephanie Atkins (Assistant Circulation Librarian). Read about the library's innovative use of StudyMate Author for training undergraduate student employees.

StudyMate Author is a powerful, Windows-based software tool that enables the creation of ten different online interactive study activities. These activities use Flash for their delivery and work well with slow and fast Internet connections alike as well as with all popular web browsers. Because they are web-based activities, they can be delivered as stand-alone exercises or easily integrated into an Illinois Compass course site. StudyMate Author can easily import questions from Respondus, a companion tool used for creating questions and quizzes for print or online use in Illinois Compass. The StudyMate Author web site provides examples of text-only based activities. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has site licensed this software so it is free for all instructors, staff, and students on this campus.

In addition to being able to create questions for activities within the StudyMate Author interface, it is also possible to import content from Word documents (though the formatting of the content must adhere to certain guidelines), Rich Text Format (.rtf) documents, Text (.txt) documents, IMS QTI (.xml) documents, and Respondus documents. Even better, many publishers are providing item banks in Respondus format for instructors who have adopted their textbooks. To see if your publisher has provided an item bank for your text, you can visit the Respondus Test Bank Network. If your textbook is listed there, you can request access to the item bank from the publisher (directly through the Test Bank Network web site) and will be able to make use of the items in StudyMate Author and/or Respondus.

Why Teachers Would Use StudyMate Author:

  • to assist students who need to memorize a great deal of information
  • to create an interactive environment where students can explore subjects at their own pace
  • to make use of a pre-existing bank of questions
  • to incorporate a bank of test questions provided by the textbook publisher
  • to easily create a weekly, chapter, or topic-specific crossword puzzle for your students
  • to easily develop a professional-looking electronic glossary for all your key course terms
  • to turn course content into an interactive game in the style of Jeopardy for use in the classroom

Training and Consulting for StudyMate Author

CITES EdTech provides training and consulting in the use of StudyMate Author. To learn about training opportunities, please see our training page.

How Can I Get StudyMate Author?

Download instructions: You can download Respondus for free from the University of Illinois WebStore. Use your NetID and NetID password to authenticate, and follow the instructions for installing the software.

Reminder: When you are ready to publish your content to Illinois Compass, remember that you need to use your Active Directory (AD) password. To set up your AD password or to refresh your memory on what your AD password is, please visit the CITES Active Directory password page.

Online Help

Online help is available from within the application. Context-sensitive help is available by pressing the F1 key. Or go to Help > Help Topics to access the main help system.

User Guides

Knowledge Base

A knowledge base for StudyMate Author & Respondus is available at http://www.respondus.com/support/index.shtml. If a problem cannot be resolved using the product documentation (i.e., online help, user guide) and if the knowledgebase doesn't provide a solution, a support ticket can be submitted from this same area.