Saturday, 22 October 2011

Updates on Spectatus

Spectatus has been updated to work with the new IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) version 2.1 schema, and has been given some new functionality. Submission mode for a test can be set to either individual or simultaneous, and navigation mode may also be controlled.

Question handling has been improved: any errors encountered on import into a test are displayed in a new message area at the bottom of the Spectatus interface (so there is no longer any need to count your questions to check that an import worked), and it is now possible to preview a single question. The issue with trying to edit a question in Windows 7 has been resolved.

Filling in of metadata is now easier for test authors, in that many of the fields (such as author and institution) default to their values from the previous editing session. The main taxonomy has been standardised, while a user-defined secondary one may be specified. We would be interested to learn what additional metadata test authors would like to be able to maintain.

A download link and project information can be found here.