Assessment and EC SIGs meeting Feb 2008

Joint Assessment/Educational Content SIG meeting


A joint meeting hosted by the Assessment and Educational Content (EC) SIG took place on Tuesday 19th February, hosted by CARET at the University of Cambridge.

About the meeting
There is increasing convergence within educational technology standards and specifications as highlighted by the current IMS Common Cartridge (CC) and Tools Interoperability (TI) initiatives. Alongside this, the increasing use of Web 2.0 technologies is providing a myriad of diverse ways to create and access content - including assessments.

Meeting content
Presentations are available below as embedded slidecasts. MP3 files are also available to download

[[Media:SteveLay.mp3|Steve Lay MP3]]; [[Media:Adam_Cooper.mp3| Adam Cooper MP3]];[[Media:WilbertKraan.mp3| Wilbert Kraan MP3]] [[Media:LinnvanderZanden.mp3|Linn van der Zanden MP3]];[[Media:NiallBarr.mp3|Niall Barr MP3]];[[Media:RossMacKenzie.mp3|Ross MacKenzie MP3]]

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QTI Update
Steve Lay, University of Cambridge gave an update on the IMS QTI specification (slidecast) 


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A Postcard from the IMS meeting in Long Beach
Adam Cooper, CETIS gave an overview of developments from the recent IMS Quarterly Meeting 


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Content Packaging Specs Update
Wilbert Kraan, CETIS gave a round up on the current state of a number of content packaging initiatives/specifications (slidecast).




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Developing Common Cartridges
Ross MacKenzie and Sarah Wood, Open University gave an overview of the processes they have developed to create IMS Common Cartridges (slidecast). 
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Assessment, Wikis and Blogs
Lin van der Zanden, SQA demonstrated a pilot project being delivered by SQA using blogs and wikis (slidecast). 
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Blogs and other comments

 * Rowin's review of the day
 * Sheila's blog of the day
 * Rene's Assessment

The AQuRate, Minibix and AsDel Dissemination Workshop (18 February)
A workshop hosted by the AQuRate, Minibix and AsDel projects took place on Monday 18th February at the offices of CARET at the University of Cambridge.

About the meeting
This workshop provided an opportunity to see demonstrations of the QTI based-tools developed by the three JISC Capital Programme assessment projects.

Blogs other notes relating to the meeting

 * Notes from the day from the projects discussion list
 * Rene's Assessment
 * Sheila's blog

AQuRate
The AQuRate project has developed an open source, platform-independent tool and API for authoring question items that conform to the IMS QTI 2.1 specification.

Minibix
The Minibix project is developing an open source item banking system for QTI v2 based items capable of supporting both high-stakes private item banks and low-stakes item banks for sharing questions suitable for formative assessment.

AsDel
ASDEL has built a small set of Web based tools for delivering QTIv2 tests. Rather than just build tools we first developed a library, JQTI, incorporating all the test functions required in the IMS QTIv2 specification. Building the library enabled the tools to be built quickly and also allows people to build a different tool that suits some new requirement and yet still conform to QYIv2.

The main three tools for this project are:

1. The  ‘QTI Playr’ a QTIv2 test delivery engine.

2. A 'Validatr' that allows the validation of the test. Its GUI is similar in operation and look & feel to that of an IDE. It also has a visual front end that displays the structure of a tests.

3. An 'Assessr' tool is used to manage the test for the academic as the test Playr only delivers the test.

We have also produced a 'Constructr' tool, which is an extremely lightweight tool that will simply allow you to select a pool of questions from an item bank and put them into a basic test.