JISC

This project has now completed. See the project website and the final report available at the foot of this page.

At the recent JISC/CETIS conference it was recommended that the community needed to ‘kick start’ the use of the IMS Question and Test Interoperability version 2.0 specifications. At this meeting it was felt that in order to achieve this there needed to be a robust set of tools and services that conformed to the QTIv2 specification.

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the project is in-line with the requirement from the assessment community to ‘kick-start QTIv2’, the project aims to take the monolithic Web Service, QTIRun and refactor it such that the main functions are divided into internal Web Services. These sub-Services are Web Services with no public interface, yet have all the advantages of Web Services (interoperable and loosely coupled systems with well defined interfaces ) As the QTIRun service deals with only a tiny number of QTIv2 question types, the new service will build on the previous work and extend it to include all types.

The specific objectives are to:

• Produce a Web service that will render and respond to all QTIv2 question types
• Report on the design and implementation
• Publish the Web Service Description (WSDL and plain English) and Code

Project Methodology

Many other projects have built partial solutions to these objectives, so the first phase will be to capture the lessons learnt and incorporate these into the design of R2Q2. The remaining work is then to implement and validate this design.

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders

The findings will be disseminated more broadly to users through the CETIS Special Interest Group on Assessment and other national and international forums. All reports, tools and code from the project will remain be available on the project server, archived in the institutional repository (E-Prints) and appropriate JISC repository. The project will produce this service that then can be used by any other assessment engine to render QTI questions and respond appropriately to a student’s answer. The project will be of interest to all those designing and implementing an assessment engine that can fit into a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and in particular the e-Framework.

Project Partners
Robert Sherratt and Steve Jeyes, e-Service Integration, University of Hull.