All entries for Friday 27 April 2007

Quizbuilder's here

Warwick’s Elab has published the first draft of Quizbuilder, its elegant tool for writing simple online tests with the minimum of fuss. You might like to try your hand at this short test of 11 multiple-choice questions on elementary number theory, which took me less than an hour to write. The LaTeX equations are a little wobbly in their baselines, but perfectly fit for purpose.

: 27 Apr 2007 17:34 |  Tags: CAA |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

OU = Open Utopia?

As part of its nearly-£5m investment in Moodle, the free open-source course management system (CMS, aka VLE), the Open University (OU) is currently adding its in-house assessment software OpenMark to Moodle’s assessment capabilities. It will also incorporate some of the authoring strengths of OpenMark into the Moodle Quiz. The full integration may take some time to complete but will mean that OpenMark becomes open source too.

OpenMark’s strengths include the ability to diplay complicated mathematical and symbolic expressions and to provide graduated targeted feedback in response to multiple attempts at variations of the same question. Given the OU’s high production standards and long term funding, this development can only bode well for the future of online assessment, in particular, the assessment of mathematics-based subjects.

: 27 Apr 2007 16:42 |  Tags: CAA |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem