Assessment Delivery for QTI v2.1 Tests Jonathon Hare School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton

The ASDEL Project One of three e-assessment projects funded in the last round of JISC capital funding Sister projects (Kingston) and minibix (Cambridge) Original aim was to build an engine for the delivery of QTI v2.1 assessments Attempts to implement all of the QTI specification with regard to the AssessmentTest class Both adaptive and non-adaptive assessments

QTI Question & Test Interoperability QTI is a specification published by IMS describing a data-model for eAssessment Designed for the representation of items and tests in an interoperable format Enables exchange between different tools Includes a standard xml binding to the data-model

Specifically, QTI is designed to: Provide a well documented content format for storing and exchanging items independent of the authoring tool used to create them. Support the deployment of item banks across a wide range of learning and assessment delivery systems. Provide a well documented content format for storing and exchanging tests independent of the test construction tool used to create them. Support the deployment of items, item banks, and tests from diverse sources in a single learning or assessment delivery system. Provide systems with the ability to report test results in a consistent manner.

QTI Items The QTI v2.0 specification supports many different types of interactions within a question It’s not just for MCQ! Questions can contain a mixture of different types of interaction They can even be adaptive The specification even supports free-text interactions which can be marked offline

The R2Q2 project aimed to make a web-service for the rendering and responding (marking) of QTI v2.0 items. Supports most of the item-types Can upload and test your own items from the demo site:

As part of the ASDEL project we have made some improvements to the original R2Q2: Bug fixes Improvements to the renderer, allowing control over what is output (summer student work) New web-service interface It’s now interoperable! Can use any toolkit/language to interface (not just limited to java+axis1.4) Basic MathML support 2

The ASDEL QTItools toolset

Technologies Target platform Java JRE 1.5 or later Any servlet container (> v2.4) i.e. Tomcat 5.5+ Development environment Java JDK 1.5 (or later) Maven 2 Subversion

JQTI Pure Java library for handling IMS QTI Currently, mostly deals with classes related to AssessmentTest (i.e. those required for ASDEL) Supports both evaluation of existing QTI xml and the creation of new xml documents Enables interpretation and evaluation of QTI Provides static analysis to attempt to determine correctness of QTI xml before it is evaluated, minimising runtime errors

QTI documents are more than just data Contain logic and instructions Standard xml schema validation isn’t enough! validatr: A QTI v2.1 validation tool and editor Find problems in your QTI xml Visualise adaptive tests Edit and modify your assessment with live feedback about potential problems

Demo

An QTI assessment player Presents a QTI v2.1 assessment to a candidate Purely an “engine” - does not deal with who the candidate is, etc. Attempts to implement all of the QTI specification with regard to the AssessmentTest class Both adaptive and non-adaptive assessments Highly configurable (xhtml) renderer Web-based and desktop versions

Demo

A lightweight assessment delivery tool (enables tutors to schedule assessments for candidates) A lightweight online assessment authoring tool (enables tests to be assembled from groups of items from item bank)

Demo

Integrating Playr Playr provides a REST-like API Can be used to embed QTI functionality in your application regardless of programming language and environment Example: Integration with the Moodle VLE (written in PHP): Moodle ‘qtiplayr’ plugin - all the functionality of assessr, but integrated as a moodle activity!

Demo

Summary We have built a Java library for handling QTI documents. On top of this we have produced a suite of server-side and desktop tools for playing and delivering QTI assessments Future Plans: R2Q2 3 - powered by JQTI Full validation of QTI items

Demos Documentation Sourcecode

Any Questions?