Dear Colleagues,

I'd like to draw your attention to the following opportunity to try out
the pre-release version of the new Physical Sciences Question Bank which
will be officially launched next week.  The question bank has been
developed by Dick Bacon who many of you will know from his work in the
area of eassessment, for the SIG and with the HEA.  There are currently
around 650 questions available which can be downloaded in a variety of
formats including QTI v1.2, with up to 3,000 contributed in total so
far.  

If you have any comments or feedback on the system, Dick would be very
pleased to hear from you at [log in to unmask]

Best wishes,
Rowin


-----Original Message-----


You are invited for you to look at and try the new Physical Sciences  
Question Bank.

This has been developed under JISC/HEA funding by the Physical  
Sciences Subject Centre
to promote the sharing and use of questions, to benefit both staff  
and students. The
official launch is at Hull on Wednesday 12th March, along with two  
other web based
resources. See the HEA web site for details.

The question bank is designed for academics to use to select  
individual items and
aggregate into assessments which can then be downloaded in a suitable  
form for
import into WebCT, Blackboard or Moodle. Questions can also be  
downloaded as
QTI v1.2 items or in Rich Text (for printing). It should be possible  
to import the QTI v1.2
items into Questionmark Perception or Respondus - although this has  
not yet been tested.
Assessments can also be created for use in the SToMP system.

The user interface combines browsing and searching, and can also  
display individual
questions in a form that allows rapid appraisal of their worth. There  
are two filters that
operate on all topics beneath the topic selected in the hierarchical  
topic tree. One is a search
filter that uses multi-level logical operations on search criteria  
applied to item descriptions,
keywords or question text. The other filter operates on question  
types, pedagogic domain
difficulty, feedback and target system. Questions are aggregated into  
a 'shopping cart'
for an assessment, from where they are packaged or otherwise put  
together as required
by the selected target.

The technology used is php scripts talking to an MS database server.  
This is currently
being ported to the main HEA web server system. While this is being  
done we are inviting
guests to use an alternative system hosted by the SToMP web server  
running here at Surrey.
This has the php scripts running on a UNIX box with an MS SQL server  
on a PC and is,
unfortunately, a little slow at times.

The questions in the database have been contributed by various HE  
development projects,
all publicly funded, from Ulster, Edinburgh, Surrey, Hull and Bath.  
About 2500 to 3000
questions have been contributed so far, but only 500 Chemistry  
questions and 150 Physics
questions have been through the quality control process and imported  
into the bank. More
are being processed as time permits, however, and an immediate target  
is to have at
least 200 Physics questions by 12 March for the launch.

http://www.stomp.ac.uk/psscqb

Username "Guest" password "Sciences"

I am very interested in any feedback you can give me about your use  
of this.

Dick Bacon.
Physical Sciences Subject Centre.
March 5, 2008.

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