Open Source Item Banking System
This project (Minibix) developed an open source item banking system for the management of assessment items using version 2 of the IMS QTI specification in both high-stakes and low-stakes environments.
Executive Summary
Working in collaboration with the AQuRate and AsDel projects we developed a service usage model (SUM) for assessment content creation and realised this model through a series of webservice interfaces defined using a 'REST'-based approach. The resulting SUM has been submitted to the e-Framework and the approach has also been documented in a paper to be presented at CAA 2008 called 'Minibix: Item Banking with Web Services'.
The resulting tools and demonstrators have been made available via the Sourcefore open source development environment under a liberal open source license (New BSD). A multi-layered approach was used to encourage future developments without tying them to particular business processes or user-interface designs. It is envisaged that providing exemplar code in this way will help reduce the level of investment required to produce tools that conform to this version of the QTI specification. Feedback from the joint project workshop suggests that, though useful, this probably isn't sufficient to 'kick-start' the adoption of the specification. The fundamental question of what people want from open source in the assessment community remains open.
Despite good working relationships between the projects and regular management level meetings the creation of a suitable collaborative framework to encourage code sharing and reuse amongst the developers took several months to develop and was not properly implemented until the second phase of the projects. However, as part of our consortium agreement we did form a joint advisory group which provided a valuable forum for the discussion of the projects in the absence of regular CETIS special interest group meetings.
Although we weren't able to use our first choice of item bank (E3AN) to evaluate Minibix for formative use we were given access to the HEA item bank for the Physical Sciences. This data was migrated to version 2 of QTI using a new version of the open source QTI Migration script developed and tested against this bank. This content is searchable and exportable from Minibix (including full-text search) and was tested in a QTI version 2 delivery system with encouraging results. A data set taken from the high-stakes Thinking Skills for Admissions test was also tested: there are still some issues with the packaging of metadata extensions and item statistics.
The Minibix project, along with AQuRate and AsDel, provided the first thorough implementation of the new features in QTI v2.1, in particular assessment tests packaging and metadata. The projects uncovered problems in the publicly available draft documentation and examples resulting in a new update and addendum which the consortium published in April 2008.