Enabling Reuse of CAA by Design
Andy Crofts · Loughborough University Institutional Repository (Loughborough University) · 1999
It takes significant resources to write good questions and to develop quality assured CAA resources, so they should be maintainable and shared as much as possible across departments, universities and the whole higher education sector via mechanisms such as test banks.CAA content is often difficult to reuse because of issues such as proprietary formats, technical obsolescence and changes of computer platforms.Some of these barriers to reuse can be reduced though logical definition.At the core of a maintainable automated assessment system there must be logical structures for assessment content, which are independent of the system used.Automatically marked assessments have been used by students over the last 3 years at Heriot-Watt University using WebTest, a tool developed for delivery of assessments to large numbers of students via the Web.WebTest was designed for efficiency for lecturer, student, test developer and administrator, while having a rich set of functionality.A logical structure is achieved by the use of XML for the definition of questions and tests.A wide bank of questions covering summative, formative and selfassessments has been developed and reused using our specification (DTD), which is independent of the WebTest engine and is being published as an open standard.The DTD enables diversity in question design, a high degree of randomization, the inclusion of mathematical display and a wide variety of question styles and answer judging mechanisms.It also does not restrict the user to web delivery, as a question is defined independently of the physical representation.As other projects take a similar approach it is worth looking for common formats between systems and particularly at the opportunity to share questions.Standards bodies such as IMS (Instructional Management Systems) have a role to play to attempt to establish common standards for data and meta-data.If structures can be agreed across the education sector then economies of scale will justify the development of high quality shared assessment resources.