LTIQuizzes

Quite early on in the QTIDI project I decided to write a demonstration application that would allow us to test LTI concepts along with a quiz system. The result was LTIQuizzes, a very simple quiz application that allows entry-level QTI 2.1 quizzes to be played through an LTI connection from a VLE. The I should really have blogged about this ages ago, however summer is a very busy time for me with conferences and software upgrades and feature development for the new academic year.

LTIQuizzes consists of an LTI connector (which is intended to be reusable software that can be linked to other systems), my original QTI 2.0 item player, APIS, and a new very basic QTI 2.1 assessment player which will eventually become part of my desktop Common Cartridge viewer, CCplayr. LTIQuizzes served a useful purpose for the QTIDI project, because it allowed us to demonstrate how QTI assessments can be linked into VLEs using LTI before our proper QTI delivery system, QTIWorks, was LTI enabled.

From the teacher's viewpoint LTIQuizzes is very straightforward to use. The teacher creates a new resource in the VLE, and clicks on the resource link which takes them into LTIQuizzes. As they are a teacher in the VLE course they are given the LTI "instructor" role, and so are shown the teacher screen in LTIQuizzes. This allows them to upload a packaged QTI question or test which will be displayed to any students that click on the VLE link into LTIQuizzes. Provided all the questions the quiz are automatically marked (i.e. there are no essay or extended test questions) LTIQuizzes will return a score to the VLE if it supports LTI version 1.1 when the student completes the assessment.

LTIQuizzes is intentionally extremely simple, and there is no way to create an activity without using an LTI link. David has taken a slightly different approach with the LTI connection in QTIWorks, where teachers set up the quiz after logging into QTIWorks directly, and then get the LTI information to configure an activity in Moodle, Blackboard or any other suitable VLE. This approach works very well with the LTI implementations that are now distributed as part of Blackboard 9 and Moodle 2.3, but is awkward with the Moodle 1.9 LTI plug-in, which assumes that administrators rather than teachers will put in most of the LTI information. When I was writing LTIQuizzes s the only LTI enabled VLE that I had access to was Moodle 1.9 with the LTI plug-in wa, so naturally I used an approach which fitted very closely with the approach taken by the developers of that version of Moodle plug-in.

Now the QTIWorks is fully LTI enabled, LTIQuizzes is much less important for our project, however I do intend to do some further work on it as it is sometimes useful to have a very simple system available for experimenting with. I will be doing some refactoring of to the APIS item player over the next few months to make it use generics properly (it's very old), and will probably use it for any experiments I do for ideas that might go into an eventual QTI 2.2. I will also be integrating the item and test player parts of LTIQuizzes into QTIPlayr so that it supports a variant of common cartridge that uses QTI 2.1 entry level assessments. The LTI interface is part of an ongoing project to provide simple lightweight LTI code in Java, C# and PHP that tool providers can use to quickly add LTI support to their software.