Digital assessment

(Dutch below) For SURF, the Dutch organisations through which institutions for higher education cooperate in the field of IT, i was involved in a program on advancing the use of digital assessment. Amongst other things i made a list of tools for digital assessments.

We needed to select tools to use for a few experiments. We were balancing

• 'open standards support' (for data portability/exchanging assessment items between systems and enabling institutions to cooperate on assessment items),
• 'available, stable, no need to develop' and
• 'open source'.

IMS QTI, although not perfect, seems the best option for interoperability. By the way: for assessments in secondary education, Dutch organisations made a NL-QTI profile based on QTI v2.1, limiting some powerful but complex-to-implement aspects of QTI 2.1 and enhancing the standard so its display capabilities on different platforms improve.

We discussed all this with Wilbert Kraan, working for CETIS in the UK and heavily involved in QTI 2.1. Wilbert told us:

• When open source has priority, a stable usable version needs to be available and open standards are of less importance: look at Rogo (supports LTI 1.0. Is considering support for LTI 1.1 (with grade feedback)) and TAO (has limited typical QTI 2.0 support. System is not modular, which is understandable given the fact of the limited QTI support)
• When open standards have priority, a stable usable version needs to be available and open source is of less importance: look at BPS Onyx (as authoring environment, assessment player (the software used during an assessment) and analysis module, as Onyx is modular) and Moodle (as itembank, supports LTI 1.0 for return of data to an ELO.
• When open standards and open source are important, but the software doesn't need to be fully developed: have a look at Uniqurate (as editor) with QTIworks (as item/assessment player) and Moodle (as item bank). This combination is being tested by a group of UK universities in the QTI-PET project.

As i thought this information could be useful for others, i decided to put it online on this blog. By the way: if you haven't heard of it: in the US there are 2 major initiatives on digital assessment, one of which is the Smarter Balanced initiative, which amongst others has a nice architecture and process schema for digital assessment. The other consortium is PARCC.

Dutch: Ik mocht bij SURF meewerken aan het Toetsing en Toetsgestuurd Leren programma. In de tekst hierboven link ik naar een lijst met tools voor digitaal toetsen die ik daarbij samenstelde. Voor een aantal experimenten zochten we tools, en probeerden te kijken naar open source tools, tools die open standaarden ondersteunden en mate waarin de tool stabiel en direct bruikbaar was. Wilbert Kraan, die in de UK intensief is betrokken bij digitaal toetsen en goed op de hoogte is van ontwikkelingen, zette voor ons op een rij wat zijn keuze zou zijn, afhankelijk van waar prioriteit lag. Hierboven staat die informatie.

Image source: The Bulletin.