With the QTI 2.1 specification finalised and released, we’re seeing significant global investment in tools that implement the spec. Tools developed by JISC projects have been central.

It has taken a while, but since March this year, IMS Question and Test Interoperability 2.1 has been released as a final specification. That means that people can implement it, secure in the knowledge that it won’t change or disappear, even if there are likely to be future versions.

The release, not coincidentally, happens at a time when there is a lot of activity regarding the use of the specification around the world. This level of investment isn’t just due to a set of documents on a website, it is also due to the fact that there is a range of working implementations available that demonstrate how QTI 2.1 works, and that’s where a couple of Jisc projects play a crucial role. But let’s have a look at what people are doing with the spec around the world first.

The Netherlands

The biggest assessment project in the low lands at the moment is the effort to move all online school exams to the QTI 2.1 format. The multi-million Euro effort is led by the Commissie voor Examens, managed by DUO, with the CITO exam body and trifork as contractors. Because of the specific demands put upon the whole infrastructure, the partners will need an extensive profile.

Accompanying the formal exam profile is the NL-QTI effort led by Kennisnet. This pragmatic but relatively rich profile of the specification is meant to facilitate an eco system of material and software for general use in schools. We should see more of that profile in the near future.

Lastly, Surf is currently running the Assessment and Assessment Driven Learning programme in higher education, which will revolve around a sharable infrastructure for online assessment. Part of that programme will be an exploration to what extent such sharing can be facilitated by QTI 2.1

Germany

The main player here is the Onyx suite from BPS. This complete assessment suite of editor, test player, analytics module and converter is built around QTI 2.1, and has been used standalone as well as integrated with the OLAT VLE. One instance of the latter that is shared between all 13 universities in Saxony has about 50.000 users, with about 25.000 log-ins per day. Similar consortia exist in Thuringia and Rhineland-Palatinate, and there are further university specific installations with a combined total of about a 108.000 users. The hosted Onyx test player runs about 300 – 1000 test runs a day.

France

The work in France is on a smaller scale, but is mature and well targeted. The MOCAH team of UPMC, Paris 6 has developed a system where QTI 2.1 source is transformed such that it can be run on generic Java or PHP based web servers, as well as specialised QTI players. The focus is on the teaching of math to secondary schools students, and it has been used in 160 classes, where 400 patterns have been created. The latter are question item templates that generate large amounts of items for students to practice on; a key requirement.

South Korea

After experiments in the past with, among other tools, QTI 2.1 generated from common word-processing tools, KERIS – the Korea Education and Research Information Service – is now engaging vendors in a project to integrate QTI 2.1 in EPUB 3 ebooks. Various options are being explored at the moment, with results due later this year.

USA

This is where the development-at-scale is taking place at the moment, thanks to the Race To The Top (RTTT) projects that were funded by the Obama administration. There are two state-led consortia – Smarter Balanced and PARCC – with a mission to overhaul the whole assessment infrastructure in schools, base it on open standards and open source software, and provide a tranche of new material to go with it. They had an initial budget of $160-170 million each, with about a third of those budgets intended for tool development. QTI 2.1, along with the Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP) extensions, is at the heart of the initiative.

The size of those consortia is having effects elsewhere too. One major educational publisher has already decided to standardise internally on QTI 2.1, and others are looking at the same option. Not that such a thing is new: organisations such as the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) and the world’s largest testing organisation – ETS – have already chosen QTI 2.1 as their internal ‘lingua franca’. Rather than make many point to point integrations between their own systems and collections, and then having to do that again with each organisation they partner with, they translate each format to and from QTI.

UK

Meanwhile, back in the UK, JISC has sponsored a small community – most recently via the Assessment & Feedback programme – that has played a vital role in making QTI 2.1 real. ‘Real’ in the sense of checking whether and how the specification would work, as it was being designed, in the case of Jassess. ‘Real’ also in the sense of putting QTI 2.1 material in the hands of a range of teachers and learners, via editing tools such as Uniqurate and playback tools such as QTIWorks. An excellent RSC Scotland post outlines exactly how those outputs of the QTI-DI and Uniqurate projects work.

All of these UK projects’ tools, guidance and assessment materials are known to all the above communities, as well as plenty of others I’ve not even mentioned. In some cases, the JISC sponsored tools have been extended by others, in other cases, the presence and online accessibility of the resources meant that those other communities knew what was possible, what their own tools and materials should look like, and how they could interoperate.

At this point, it’s not clear whether new Jisc will support future work in this area. What is clear, however, is that JISC’s past investment will continue to have a global effect well beyond the initial outlay.