Hi all, the Web in our mind makes a lot of the previous proprietary
instructional and testing solutions obselete.  iMath and Course Avenue
provide elegant open Web solutions for the delivery of online testing and
they support the Web math standard (MathML).  We encourage you all to stop
putting new data into old clothes and use the Web and open standards as a
framework for the future course materials (including testing).

Remember just because an application gives you a Web delivery mode, does not
make it an open Web solution.  Ask yourself, is the data portable?  Can I
move my implementation to other applications?  Am I authoring a Web
document?  What is the applications data format?  Do they implement
extensions that are not portable?

Today it is estimated that 25% of the cost of Web site development is due to
browser incompatibilities.  In education IMS is on track to resolve this,
but today it doesn't.  The IMS compliant vendors implement proprietary
extensions which are not portable.  The cost of redeploying courses deployed
in one tool into another is much higher than 25%.  We are currently
redeploying instructors WebCT, Blackboard, Question Mark and other sites
into iMath (and Course Avenue) and are intimately aware of these issues.
For a draft article that describes some of these issues, email me.

iMath (Internet Math Consortium) provides its solutions free for individual
use and free to iMath affiliates.  Non-affiliates can license iMath
technologies at extremely reasonable prices.

Visit http://www.imath.net and get a free iMath account today and begin to
discover how you can maintain your course materials and testing frameworks
using open standards.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss the new world of
educational delivery through the Web/XML, please drop us a note or phone
1-217-367-3245.

Regards

Steve

Dr Stephen M. Hunt
Director
Internet Math Consortium
[log in to unmask]
http://www.imath.org

-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of John Kleeman
Sent: Monday, June 26, 2000 10:49 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Students answering with equations and symbols


For those who don't know us, Question Mark are a company
working in testing and assessment. Our Perception product
is widely used in UK universities and other places for
computerized assessments.

One thing that people have been asking us for over 10 years
and which to date we haven't been able to offer is a way
of having students answer questions by typing in equations.

We've come up with a possible way of doing this, albeit in
a limited way using the standard multiple hotspot (drag and
drop) question type in Question Mark Perception v2.2.

The way this works is:
1. A question is presented with a number of boxes on the screen.
2. Additionally a number of graphical markers are presented.
3. The student drags the markers onto the boxes to make their answers.

For example, you could have 5 boxes and graphical markers for
"e", "m", "=", "c" and "2 superscript" and ask the student to
fill in the formula for general relativity.

The main limitation of such a system is that you have to have
all the graphics available to drag and drop, and there also is
a limit (probably around 10 or 20) of possible such markers.

We've got some example questions that use this way of presenting
questions, and we'd be very interested in comments from people
as to how useful these might be in practice.

Depending on the comments we receive, we'll plan to make this
question type widely available to all users of Perception, including
a range of marker graphics for all popular symbols.

If anyone (QM user or not, but not a competitor company) is interested
in seeing these questions, please drop me an email (to
[log in to unmask])
off list, and I will email you a demo for comment. This is about a 600K
zip file, and will run on any PC with IE 4/5 installed.

John Kleeman MA MBCS C.Eng ([log in to unmask])
Managing Director, Question Mark Computing Ltd
    tel	 +44 (0) 20.7263.7575
    fax	 +44 (0) 20.7263.7555
    web	 http://www.qmark.com






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