Interoperability for Item Banking: (some of) the sordid details
Dick Bacon University of Surrey HEA Physical Sciences Subject Centre
Interoperability for Item Banking Physical Sciences Question Bank aims: to support the sharing of questions to be useable by academics system must be simple/obvious to use it must be easy to find the required questions the questions must be of good quality it must be easy to use the questions to support combined browsing and searching to display usage and user ratings/feedback to have support for submitting questions A survey showed science departments mostly used WebCT Blackboard Moodle Questionmark Perception SToMP So the system must be engineered so that it is simple to use our questions in these systems
Should be easy – they are all more or less QTI compliant ? !
Most questions in the bank are MCQs, so we started work with these and Multiple Selection An example MCQ: SELECT THE RIGHT ANSWER A) WRONG B) RIGHT C) LEFT and a similar Multiple Selection:
. . start with WebCT . . WebCT The MCQ xml (SToMP) looks like this:
Multiple Choice RIGHT ANSWER]]> WRONG RIGHT LEFT LA 0 LB 1
LC 0 NO THIS IS LEFT WRONG]]> YES THIS IS RIGHT]]> NO THIS IS WRONG]]>
The same question created in WebCT and exported looks like this:
qmd_questiontype Multiple-choice wct_questiontype WCT_MultipleChoice layoutHorizontal false wct_question_labelledletter No wct_authorWebctGlid 2691440001 wct_questioncategory Question types wct_usedbyassessment psc090 wct_authorFullName Dr Richard Bacon
SELECT THE <strong>RIGHT</strong> ANSWER WRONG RIGHT LEFT MC0 0.0 MC1 100.0 MC2 0.0 WRONG:
<B>NO</B> THIS IS WRONG RIGHT: <B>YES</B> THIS IS CORRECT LEFT: <B>NO</B> THIS IS LEFT WRONG
Thus, changes needed incude: response_label idents = " MCn ", etc mattext labels = " wct_mc_answer_textn “ required setvar action = " add " linkrefid = " wct_mc_answer_fbn " in feedback: mattext labels = “ wct_mc_answer_fbn " also . . . Using "right answer" feedback and "general" feedback in WebCT produces this xml:
. . . . CORRECT? WRONG RIGHT
LEFT MC0 0.0 MC1 100.0 MC2 0.0 NO, LEFT AND WRONG ARE INCORRECT RIGHT: YES, RIGHT IS RIGHT
So in a QTI engine, the general feedback is never displayed. Thus for WebCT, converting an MCQ question with "other" feedback requires it to be replicated for each wrong option to stop it always being displayed. The Multiple Selection question has one additional problem – the sum of the score must be exactly 100.00 Thus if there are three correct options, and the first two both have scores of 33.33, then the last must have the score 33.34
Blackboard
The MCQ question created in Blackboard and exported looks like this:
_149431_1 Assessment Pool Subsection Multiple Choice false 0.0,0.0 0.0 0.0 Proprietary Logical Identifier School 0.0 0 Proprietary Single Absolute Normal 0 0.0 Complete _149432_1 Section Pool Subsection Multiple Choice false 0.0,0.0 0.0 0.0 Proprietary Logical Identifier School 0.0 0 Proprietary Single Absolute Normal 0 0.0 Complete _149433_1 Item
Pool Subsection Multiple Choice false 0.0,0.0 0.0 0.0 Proprietary Logical Identifier School 0.0 0 Proprietary Single Absolute Normal 0 0.0 Complete SELECT THE <STRONG>RIGHT</STRONG> ANSWER WRONG RIGHT
LEFT F6DE35016B4711DCC8BA5411A874A263 SCORE.max 0.0 OK, YOU DID WELL
NO, YOU MISSED THE OBVIOUS <STRONG>NO</STRONG>, WRONG IS WRONG <STRONG>YES</STRONG>, RIGHT IS RIGHT
<STRONG>NO</STRONG>, LEFT IS WRONG
So for MCQ’s in Blackboard we need to: create extra xml for the text and/or images, flow classes, s, etc., manipulate conditions for "correct" and "other", put appropriate feedback into "correct", and "incorrect", or into "correct" and specific. also . . . Multiple Selection questions in Blackboard can only have one correct and one incorrect feedback. So, MS conversion to Bb requires: a) the one correct condition to be created b) all specific feedback messages to be aggregated and turned into correct and incorrect feedback. . . AND . . The order of the options in the condition has to match the order they appear in the Question
Moodle
Compared to these, Moodle is relatively simple. It does not import any QTI and so questions have to be converted into another format. It did not take much longer to implement this conversion than to sort out the WebCT or the Blackboard conversions. Note that, to ensure compatibility, questions have to be edited into a limited set of styles. So, where does this leave QTI interoperability?
Interoperability is only a valid concept for questions using compatible features in both source and target systems. The most frequently used VLE assessment systems (UK, HE Science) do not help with this requirement for question types other than the simplest MCQ’s On the other hand, taking donated questions from QMP, correcting the QTI and importing into SToMP and TOIA for reviewing was comparatively quick and simple. For your information, the SToMP question editor, in addition to flexible QTI v1.2 editing facilities (with numeric extensions), currently supports • conversions of Moodle QTI v2 MCQ and MS questions to v1, • v1 QTI to WebCT and Blackboard forms, • v1 QTI to Moodle xml (not QTI) Physical Sciences Question Bank Project For more information, or for a trial view of the site, contact Dick Bacon r.bacon@surrey.ac.uk