Hi all.
It's been a while since I've posted, but some of you may remember I was working on a question type plugin to have questions processed by a remote server. We're actually using it in a class now, and I consider it to be in Beta and thus ready for an initial release.
I'm releasing it under the GPL.
All of this information is available in more detail at the webpage:
http://www.stat.umn.edu/~leif/moodle/
I don't have CVS access, so I'll need some help with that. A direct link to a zipped version of the question type is:
http://www.stat.umn.edu/~leif/software/ltjprocessed.zip
In brief, this question type plugin allows Moodle to send a question for pre-processing to a remote server for pre processing for each student attempt. Optionally you can send the students answer (along with some saved data files) back to the remote server for grading. The question type can grade single number (+/- a tolerance) inside of Moodle, in that case it only communicates with the server during question attempt creation.
Our goals in creating this question type were to
1. Have a way to incorporate R (http://www.r-project.org/) into online quizes for students.
2. Have repeatable (new data everytime) questions for students to allow for increased practice and prevent cheating as much as possible.
Communication with the remote server is done via xml-rpc. The question type is language agnostic. I have a remote server writtent that processes questions using R, but any other language or system would work. I'm going to release my rserver very soon as well, and I'm still working on the documentation for the communication protocol.
I can post screen shots etc here if desired, but I already have a bunch in the documentation on my site:
http://www.stat.umn.edu/~leif/moodle/documentation/
leif
Can I just ask, did you know about Development:Open_protocol_for_accessing_question_engines before you started? It sounds like what you are doing is slightly different anyway.
The best way to share your code it to follow the procedure on Development:Guidelines_for_contributed_code, to get it into the contrib area of CVS.
The best way to share your code it to follow the procedure on Development:Guidelines_for_contributed_code, to get it into the contrib area of CVS.
Sure you can ask. Yep, I knew about opaque and we almost went with it. In the end we decided that it just didn't quite work the way we wanted. Total trouble/work was estimated to be less going with our own solution vs trying to get existing systems to work in a way we liked.
Thanks for the link, I'll take a look at the Development guideline for submitting.
leif
Thanks for the link, I'll take a look at the Development guideline for submitting.
leif
hi again,
I created the Tracker issue (CONTRIB-709), hopefully I checked all the right boxes and whatnot.
Also, I'll comment here that the primary difference between this and Opaque is where the question engine lives. For this question type, Moodle is still the question engine with all of the database, user authentication etc. etc. responsibilites. The remote processing server does not track any of that. The remote processing server does not even need to know what a question is. It just does some text processing.
My server, which I creatively call 'rserver', runs elements of the text through R and replaces parts with output. But my rserver is very simple, it is written entirely in python and is only 319 lines of code long. One of the hopes is that this will make it easier to have different methods of processing questions.
We're using it in a class this semester here (Univ of Minnesota, Twin Cities) on the main university moodle server.
leif
I created the Tracker issue (CONTRIB-709), hopefully I checked all the right boxes and whatnot.
Also, I'll comment here that the primary difference between this and Opaque is where the question engine lives. For this question type, Moodle is still the question engine with all of the database, user authentication etc. etc. responsibilites. The remote processing server does not track any of that. The remote processing server does not even need to know what a question is. It just does some text processing.
My server, which I creatively call 'rserver', runs elements of the text through R and replaces parts with output. But my rserver is very simple, it is written entirely in python and is only 319 lines of code long. One of the hopes is that this will make it easier to have different methods of processing questions.
We're using it in a class this semester here (Univ of Minnesota, Twin Cities) on the main university moodle server.
leif
Looks like you have done the right thing. I reassigned the issue to Anthony Borrow, who is contrib coordinator. Hopefully he can take it from here.
Is it possible to use this type of question inside Embedded Answers (Cloze) question type?