Trackback URL: Trackback
Permalink URL: Permalink
Building user friendly software for interoperability specifications
July 19th, 2006
Open specifications for interoperable learning technology should be very useful, because they enable the users to rely on their own systems, without the resources, or the implementation of teaching or learning being dependent on specific proprietary systems. As an example of the usefulness of open specifications, let us recall that the web is based on the HTML language, and this has allowed us to be highly independent of proprietary systems.
IMS is one of the main organisations which develops open specifications for eLearning. Several IMS specifications have become worldwide standards for delivering learning products and services, and the move is going on. However, these specifications are difficult to use by people with rather simplistic technological background such as teachers, small learning institutions, and others.
In order to facilitate the dissemination of these standards, the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona has been working on a set of experimental tools that provide user friendly interfaces for some IMS specifications such as Question & Test Interoperability, and Learning Design. The technical development work is based on libraries which were developed in Java to implement functionalities associated with the specifications such as saving and instance of a schema, verifying the instance’s compatibility with the specifications, and implementing the fields, data structures, and relations defined in the specifications. These libraries mirror in their structure a direct mapping of the specification hierarchy into a set of Java classes.
The QAed tool developed at Pompeu Fabra University is a complete open source implementation that facilitates the creation and management of assessment repositories, based on a user centered strategy. It implements a subset of the IMS Question & Test Interoperability specification known as QTI-Lite. IMS specifications promote coordination between distributed learning environments and content from multiple authors and this is also supported by QAed. The tool relies on a set of QTI-Lite Libraries which could be reused in the context of any e-learning framework and are part of the set of libraries mentioned in the previous paragraph. The QAed tool is a standalone application based on teachers’ needs, and implements some practical functionalities which go beyond the specification.
IMS QTI specification is evolving. The current version is QTI 2.0, and there is a quite developed draft of version 2.1. Current Pompeu Fabra University efforts related to QTI involve the upgrade of the libraries to cover a large part of the 2.0 and the 2.1 draft specifications which have been mentioned. The work is building on that of the JISC funded project APIS, but major additions and restructuring have already taken place. The resulting libraries will be released in the immediate future. In the framework of the European TenCompetence project, QAed, which is a stand-alone application, is also being transformed into an open-source plug-in for service oriented architectures (such as those supported by JISC and DEST eFramework). Current Pompeu Fabra University work also includes an easy to use editor based on templates for the Learning Design specification. Let us mention the related work Collage and the RELOAD Learning Design editor.
Experimentations with these tools are helping to design a way to bring the IMS specifications a visage that can be utilized by novice learners or learning designers in producing, distributing, and consuming learning components in accordance with global specifications.
Entry Filed under: Standards, IMS Learning Design, Interoperability, Tools
Leave a Comment
Trackback this post |
Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed