Start date: 1 March 2007
End date: 31 March 2008
Funding programme: e-Learning Capital programme
Project website:
http://aqurate.kingston.ac.uk/
JISC theme(s): e-Learning, e-Administration
This project has completed. See the project website and download the final report.
Overview
The project will develop an open source, standards compliant and platform-independent tool to enable the authoring of question items conforming to the current IMS QTI 2 Specification. The core tool would be desktop-based system that enables the production of as wide a range of QTI 2.1 question types as is allowed in the project timescale. Question Items will be packaged as SCORM 2004 compliant IMS Content Packages. The Project aims to integrate the AQuRate Authoring Tool with the two other eAssessment components: namely Item Banking and Assessment Delivery. The aim is to create a full eAssessment lifecycle to promote the use of QTIv2 and provide an alternative to commercial systems.
The project is working in close collaboration with other projects also funded by JISC (under the Technical developments to support learning and teaching Assessment strand) These deal with Item Banking AsDel (University of Southampton) and Assessment Delivery Minibix (University of Cambridge).
Aims and objectives
The aim is to create a desktop authoring tool for developing questions for multiple-choice tests.
The core functionality of the system will be to:
- Create new QTI 2.1 items
- Edit existing QTI 2.1 items
- Import and Export QTI 2.1 items (from / to other pre-existing systems)
- Package QTI 2.1 Items as IMS Content Packages that are SCORM 2004 compliant
- Use external web services for testing the rendering and response of questions using one or more of Assessment Delivery, Assessment Rendering and QTI validation systems
- Use external web services for depositing and retrieving questions from Item Banks
- Dual layer architecture separating the presentation and core logic components of the system (for extensibility)
The system will be designed with the following aims in mind:
- Offline creation of assessments
- Offline rendering of assessments
- Production of new system interfaces e.g. plug-ins, web services, server pages
- Extension and Development of new System Capabilities e.g. extra question types, use of items with sequenced content (such as in JELFAD demonstrator), support for custom interactions (such as the ASAP automated program marker)
Project methodology
The project will incorporate an educational study of both existing tools and project outputs. These user trials will feed into the requirements analysis and testing & evaluation, in order to control the quality and usability of the final deliverable software.
The team are using DSDM to manage the project, and focusing on the use of Java and XML for the delivery of the Desktop-client. The system architecture will be designed in order to allow the core functionality of the software to be extensible – to other user environments and interfaces (such as plug-ins or web-based clients) or to developers who wish extend the system capabilities.
Additional the project team are working in close collaboration from day one with the related AsDel and Minibix projects.
Anticipated impact
The broad concept here within a set of related projects is to provide an open source alternative for those wishing to produce, manage and run multiple-choice tests in education.
Lead institution
Project partners