Comments on: IMS QTI and the economics of interoperability

By: Jens Schwendel

Jens Schwendel — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:41:39 +0000

Hello Wilbert,

I just stumbled over this post today – it’s very good argumented and summarizes the way-to-go for all software vendors interested in QTI (and for IMS as well).

Fortunately we came to the same conclusions and are working on QTI2.1-tools (ONYX, ELQUES) which follow your ‘rich profile, many-to-few, asymmetric’ – way. Hopefully we get enough VLE vendors involved which use it and are willing to pool development resources

By: John Taylor

John Taylor — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:25:05 +0000

Interesting blog post. What would you say was the most important marketing factor?

By: Tavis Reddick

Tavis Reddick — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 09:05:32 +0000

It’s how HTML works on the web: uncountable sources that need to target only about four codebases (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, WebKit, Opera), one of which dominates to such an extent that the others need to emulate its behaviour.

I’m not sure that this is borne out by Internet Explorer 8 moving towards the other three browsers in rendering HTML and CSS. Possibly this suggests that if you have strong interoperability between three applications, this can counteract the larger market share of a fourth?
You might take into account the effect of standards on other standards, which can be a developing and shifting picture; for example the influence of XML on HTML, and importance of XHTML on mobile devices.
Another possibility is that open source software allows quicker implementation of standards across certain distributions of application development. For example, a reusable CSS rendering component.

By: Structured Methods › links for 2009-04-08

Structured Methods › links for 2009-04-08 — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:03:36 +0000

[…] IMS QTI and the economics of interoperability In the twelve years of its existence, an awful lot has been learned about interoperability by IMS staff and members. This is nowhere more apparent than in the most quintessentially educational of interoperability standards: question and test items (QTI). A recent public spat about the IMS QTI specification provides an interesting contrast to two emerging views of how to achieve interoperability. Fortunately for QTI, they’re not incompatible with each other. (tags: IMS QTI question_and_test_interoperability JISC) […]