The Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM) sets and maintains standards for safe General Practice/ Family Medicine in Australia, focusing on the special needs of those living in rural and remote communities. ACRRM provides one of the 2 nationally accredited pathways to Fellowship (Board Registration) in General Practice / Family Medicine in Australia, a process that includes successful completion of a series of high stakes summative assessments.

ACRRM plays a key role in setting the standards for rural and remote medicine in Australia, and it is against this background that ACRRM has extensively employed online delivery tools to support those living and working outside the metropolitan zone.

“Our main challenge is to encourage doctors to practice long-term in rural areas,” explains ACRRM’s Online Services Manager, Lex Lucas. “To do that we have to be able to provide them with the ongoing education and assessment opportunities they can access, without having to leave their communities to attend.”

ACRRM was an early adopter of distance education and online deployment. For many years the college has used the online learning portal designed and built in-house (known as RRMEO) to deploy education and to track members’ continuing education records.

In 2007 ACRRM had a requirement to deliver online high stakes multiple choice question (MCQ) examinations. After an extended search, ACRRM chose Questionmark™ Perception™ as an ideal tool to meet these requirements. Since then, ACRRM has successfully developed and delivered three-hour, 125-question MCQ exams run on Perception.

Attending a three-day Questionmark workshop in New Zealand helped Lucas connect with other Perception users and gather ideas for future projects using new software features and tools.

“We first felt like we were doing things in a vacuum — by ourselves — and then realised that there’s a whole community of users out there to learn from and bounce ideas off,” recalls Lucas.

During the workshop Lucas became familiar with Questionmark Live, a browser-based authoring tool that enables subject-matter experts to create question sets easily and submit them for inclusion in Perception assessments. He says Questionmark Live will help ACRRM move to a more integrated system across the exam writing, editing, delivery and marking process.

“Rural doctors, academics, and editors will all be able to log into Questionmark Live, review changes, refine and manage question writing without the expense or inconvenience that face-to-face meetings would require,” Lucas explains. “Questionmark Live will help us improve the quality of our questions by tracking versions and revisions, thereby strengthening the integrity of our assessment process.”