Implementation of IMS Question and Test Interoperability Standard

For a client project, we needed to allow the client to capture and deploy complex forms. As the requirements were intricate and sure to grow, we decided to look around for a standard that we could rely on. We found the IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. (IMS) , a standards-making industry consortium. They have two goals:

1. Defining the technical specifications for interoperability of applications and services in distributed learning, and
2. supporting the incorporation of the IMS specifications into products and services worldwide.

One of their standards is the Question & Test Interoperability Specification , which we began to implement. This specification provides a standard XML language for describing questions and tests.

ZQTI and QTIEditor: our implementation

We implemented three modules:

• a through-the-web editor for QTI questionnaires, based on the editor of Infrae's Silva CMS . The editor allows a user to build a questionnaire consisting of multiple sections, fill-in-the-blank questions, and multiple-choice questions.
• ZQTI, a python product that imports QTI XML as a tree of Zope objects, and renders them as HTML form(s).
• pyqti, a python module that installs in site-packages. ZQTI is a Zope wrapper around this. The intention is that as little as possible of our QTI implementation is Zope-specific.

The XML document edited by the editor is transformed to QTI XML, and imported by ZQTI. The editor represents a simplified view of the extremely general QTI specification.

So far, we have a client-specific subset of the specification up and running. Here are some screenshots:

• The editor, editing a questionnaire:
  
  
• The rendered questionnaire being filled in:
  
  
• The questionnaire in the ZMI:
  
  
  
  (Note that the icons in this screenshot are just placeholders lifted from the (very nice) titanium icon set for Plone )

Dependencies

Our work builds on some existing Zope Products, namely:

• OrderedObjectManager, XMLWidgets, ParsedXML
• we are writing unit tests using ZopeTestCase.