Thanks for reference, Richard, the Sclater, Low & Barr conference paper is
worth a read....
"It may be that both Blackboard and WebCT are content to allow those who are
interested in question and test interoperability to use QuestionMark (which
effectively plugs in to their products anyway) and let it take the
development cost hit. But for the many thousands of users who are developing
banks of questions with these VLEs alone, they will find them impossible or
very difficult to transfer out of these systems for the time being." (p.11)
This is surely a huge issue for the sector - a HEI/college using Bb or WebCT
could be creating thousands of potentially 'redundant' assessment resources.
It's laser disks, Beta Max all over again.
Certainly from the Bb side of things, we need to know if future development
will allow the exporting of assessments in XML QTI standard. And will this
fix be retrogressively applied to earlier versions (5.5 and 6). Given
Barbara Watson's recent meeting with Bb, I wonder if she can shed light on
Bb development in this area?
Spencer
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Parsons [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 03 April 2003 11:35
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: CAA and Blackboard
Good question, and one we are interested in at Dundee, where we are
moving to Enterprse Bb 6.0 and have an Institutional License for
QuestionMark.
> Is it possible to export questions (and pools) out of Blackboard 5.5 (or
6)
and
> import them into Perception? I have read the bumpf about compatible
IMS QTI
> standards and that's all fine and dandy. But I can't see how to export out
> questions from Bb in QTI XML format that is acceptable to Perception.
Any ideas
> anyone, or experience?
This issue was addressed by a paper at last years CAA conference in
Loughborough. By Sclater, N, Low B and Bar N. It can be reached from the
link below. The conclusion was that Bb 5.5 export of questions is not in an
IMS QTI format that QuestionMark can interpret. My experience (and
attempts to translate questions) agrees with this.
http://caa2003.lboro.ac.uk/caaconference/
An alternative approach is to recode the questions, and with appropriate
tools this is a relatively straightforward exercise. QuestionMark has an
ASCII import function, and I (and others) have written various online tools
to
make transfers relatively straightforward.
Feel free to test our attempts at:
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/learning/caa/index.htm
I will welcome feedback on how these could be improved to be of more
generic use.
Richard
Richard Parsons ph: (44) +1382 344265
Centre for Learning & Teaching fax: (44) +1382 221057
Room G41 Tower Email: [log in to unmask]
University of Dundee DD14HN
VLE info: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/learning/vle/
|