This is the second of a series of blog posts on assessment standards. Today I’d like to focus on the IMS QTI (Question and Test Interoperability) Specification.

It’s worth mentioning the difference between Specifications and Standards: Specifications are documents that industry bodies have agreed on (like IMS QTI XML), while Standards have been published and committed to by a formal legal body (like AICC or HTML). A Specification is less formal than a Standard but still can be very useful for interoperability.

Questionmark was one of the originators of QTI. When we migrated our assessment platform from Windows to the Web in the 1990s, our customers had to migrate their questions from one platform to the other. As you will know, it takes a lot of time to write high quality questions, and so it’s important to be able to carry them forward independently of technology. We knew that we’d be improving our software over the years and we wanted to ensure the easy transfer of questions from one version to the next. So we came up with QML (Question Markup Language), an open and platform-independent method of maintaining questions that makes it easy for customers to move forward in the future.

Although QML did solve the problem of moving questions between Questionmark versions, we met many customers who had difficulty bringing content created in another vendor’s proprietary format  into Questionmark. We  wanted to help them, and we also wanted to embrace openness and allow Questionmark customers to export out their questions in a standard format if they ever wanted to leave us. So we worked with other vendors within the umbrella of the IMS Global Learning Consortium to come up with QTI XML, a language that describes questions in a technology-neutral way.  I was involved in the work defining IMS QTI as were several of my colleagues: Paul Roberts did a lot of technical design, Eric Shepherd led the IMS working group that made QTI version 1, and Steve Lay (before joining Questionmark) led the version 2 project.

Here is a fragment of QTI XML and you can see that it is a just-about-human-readable way of describing a question.

I’ve prepared a video podcast which is your introduction to key interoperability standards for elearning. It also serves as my introduction to video podcasts. Your feedback on both the content and the style will be put to use as I continue the series—so please post comments or send email.

The video for Part 1 provides a quick overview of the need for interoperability standards, the names of the keys standards, and the types of interoperability they support. Part 1 addresses AICC, ADL SCORM, IEEE LTSC and IMS specifications at a high level. It introduces the concepts of run-time communication, content packaging, and meta-data.

I hope you find it a good refresher if you are already somewhat knowledgeable about these standards, and an excellent introduction if you are new to most of this.

Posted by John Kleeman

Questionmark has been a long time supporter of QTI XML. QTI XML is a language that describes  questions in XML in a way that is platform and technology neutral.

Questions take a long time to write, and it’s important that they can survive in computerized form as technology changes. At Questionmark, our customers often need to take questions constructed in an older system, sometimes a discontinued system, and move them into Questionmark software. When the legacy questions are in QTI XML, this is reasonably straightforward. When the questions are held deep inside a proprietary database or other structure, it can be more challenging to move them into another system.

Eric Shepherd, Paul Roberts and myself were part of the original IMS team that created QTI XML, and Eric led the team that created and evangelized it for many years. Steve Lay, before he joined Questionmark was one of the leaders of the QTI version 2 initiative. Questionmark as a company is a keen supporter of QTI XML – it’s a good way for our customers to be confident that questions are likely to survive into the long term future.

Version 1.2.1 of the IMS QTI specification was finalized in 2003 and is supported by Questionmark Perception and in our Content Converter application .

IMS has been working for many years on a version 2 of IMS QTI, and version 2.0 was introduced and finalized, and then a draft version 2.1. You may have seen some controversy recently as the IMS has withdrawn the draft version 2.1 of QTI, removing it from their website saying that they want to review it and change it.

Version 2.1 of QTI XML has been in draft form for a couple of years, and although Questionmark hasn’t yet supported it, very many projects have done so, and there is concern from those who have implemented it that their work might not be valid when 2.1 or 2.2 is finalized. See Rowin Young of CETIS’s blog for one perspective on this.

I’d like to reassure our customers that Questionmark continues to support QTI XML version 1.2.1 and will expect to support later versions of QTI XML when formally released as final and open specifications.