IMS QTI - how seriously should the world take it?

IMS QTI - how seriously should the world take it?

por James McCormack -
Número de respostas: 5

This is an outgrowth of a previous recent thread on QuestionmarkPerception.

My question is simple: how seriously should the world take IMS QTI?

I know what Howard thinks of it as a standard, and I agree with him absolutely. But just because something is incomprehensible and bloated unfortunately doesn't mean we can void it.

How widely is IMS QTI being adopted? How seriously is it likely to be taken?

Building on this, what rivals are there? Moodle XML is wonderfully simple but too simple.

Cheers,

James McCormack

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Re: IMS QTI - how seriously should the world take it?

por Howard Miller -
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Well, hmmmm.....

Moodle XML to state the obvious perhaps, is designed to support Moodle quiz code. It has no greater aspirations than that. I don't know why it should be more complicated - to answer what problem?

IMS QTI is just a victim of a standard designed by a committee of people with vested interests. To ape a Monty Python sketch it has become "Everything in a Bucket". The upshot is that while (for example) Blackboard uses QTI, Respondus uses QTI and so do others - I would put money on it that BB QTI won't interact with Respondus QTI (sorry if I'm wrong). We already have several importers that are all nominally QTI, but the differences are so great that they are discrete developments. To me this is the mark of a standard that has failed.

The other side of the coin is that it is just too complicated. Again, IMHO, a mark of a good standard is that is it reasonably easy to understand. Even getting the right files off the IMS web site is an intellectual challenge before you even start!
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Re: IMS QTI - how seriously should the world take it?

por James McCormack -

Yes - I know Moodle XML had modest aspirations sorriso I just like saying it in the same breath as IMS QTI ;)

So what you're saying is that while QTI is being widely adopted by the wealthy, they're undermining themselves anyway with incompatible dialects?

Or is there a core which one can be pretty safe with?

Where I'm vaguely going with this is whether people in the free/open source end of the market should be getting together and cobbling up a rival standard. I need to add an "open XML" export of some format to Qedoc anyway, just so that people's creations are future-safe, and this format would need to be pretty feature-rich. It might make sense to put some heads together in the free/open source arena and agree something (but no camels, no committees and no prelimary 4th sub-report drafts).

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Re: IMS QTI - how seriously should the world take it?

por Howard Miller -
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Well, I think that it's just surfacing the fact that various quiz platforms are not particularly compatible.

QTI has the advantage that it can represent a very diverse range of quiz formats in xml. Well that's all fine and dandy but does it facilitate interoperability? I don't think it does. In the general sense, to import arbitrary QTI you would need to make some very intelligent decisions about how the features map to your target quiz engine. And that's *if* they map at all (and what do you do if they don't?). The result is that it is probably easier to do what Moodle does and simply write a Blackboard6 importer - the fact that it is QTI is incidental.

I think that the only way to develop a useful standard would be via a "lowest common denominator" approach, but that means that everybody is going to have to loose some of their functionality in the process and that sounds like a big argument in the making.

Just my $0.02!
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Re: IMS QTI - how seriously should the world take it?

por Joseph Rézeau -
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Howard > "I think that the only way to develop a useful standard would be via a "lowest common denominator" approach, but that means that everybody is going to have to loose some of their functionality in the process..."

Exactly! Thanks, Howard for spelling this out. I've been working in Computer Assisted Language Learning for more than 20 years and I still do not believe at all in the promises of those QTI, Scorm and all other e-learning standards. More often than not standardization means impoverishement.evil

Joseph

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Re: IMS QTI - how seriously should the world take it?

por James McCormack -

I agree with your sentiments too, Joseph. 100%. Standardisation isn't just impoverishment - they are an obstacle to creativity when done the wrong way, and IMS-QTI is the worst I've ever seen. But, it may be a nettle that has to be grasped.

Perhaps the way forward is "LCD(IMS-QTI)". (LCD - lowest common...)

If this was the way forward, the first step would be to write "an idiot's guide to LCD(IMS-QTI)" (cf what I did with Moodle XML, Howard, but perhaps a wee bit longer) so that people can implement it without losing their sanity?

Is there such a thing in existence?

James

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