exams2qti21 {exams}

Generation of Exams in QTI 2.1 Format

Description

Automatic generation of exams in QTI 2.1 format.

Usage

  exams2qti21(file, n = 1L, nsamp = NULL, dir = ".",
    name = NULL, quiet = TRUE, edir = NULL,
    tdir = NULL, sdir = NULL, verbose = FALSE, rds = FALSE,
    resolution = 100, width = 4, height = 4, svg = FALSE, encoding  = "UTF-8",
    num = NULL, mchoice = NULL,
    schoice = mchoice, string = NULL, cloze = NULL,
    template = "qti21", duration = NULL,
    stitle = NULL, ititle = NULL,
    adescription = "Please solve the following exercises.", sdescription = "",
    maxattempts = 1, cutvalue = NULL, solutionswitch = TRUE,
    casesensitive = TRUE, cloze_schoice_display = "auto",
    navigation = "nonlinear", allowskipping = TRUE, allowreview = FALSE,
    allowcomment = FALSE, shufflesections = FALSE, zip = TRUE, points = NULL,
    eval = list(partial = TRUE, rule = "false2", negative = FALSE),
    converter = NULL, envir = NULL, engine = NULL, base64 = TRUE, mode = "hex",
    include = NULL, selection = c("pool", "exam"), flavor = "plain", ...)

  make_itembody_qti21(shuffle = FALSE, defaultval = NULL,
    minvalue = NULL, maxvalue = NULL, enumerate = FALSE,
    digits = NULL, tolerance = is.null(digits), maxchars = 12,
    eval = list(partial = TRUE, rule = "false2", negative = FALSE),
    solutionswitch = TRUE, casesensitive = TRUE,
    cloze_schoice_display = c("auto", "buttons", "dropdown"),
    copypaste = TRUE)

Arguments

file

character. A specification of a (list of) exercise files.

n

integer. The number of copies to be compiled from file.

nsamp

integer. The number(s) of exercise files sampled from each list element of file. Sampling without replacement is used if possible. (Only if some element of nsamp is larger than the length of the corresponding element in file, sampling with replacement is used.)

dir

character. The default is the current working directory.

name

character. A name prefix for resulting exercises and ZIP file (must not contain spaces or periods, otherwise replaced by underscores).

quiet

logical. Should output be suppressed when calling xweave?

edir

character specifying the path of the directory (along with its sub-directories) in which the files in file are stored (see also xexams).

tdir

character specifying a temporary directory, by default this is chosen via tempfile. Note that this is cleaned up (i.e., existing files are deleted) and only certain temporary files are preserved.

sdir

character specifying a directory for storing supplements, by default this is chosen via tempfile.

verbose

logical. Should information on progress of exam generation be reported?

rds

logical indicating whether the return list should also be saved as an RDS data file.

resolution, width, height

numeric. Options for rendering PNG (or SVG) graphics passed to xweave.

svg

logical. Should graphics be rendered in SVG or PNG (default)?

encoding

character, ignored. The encoding is always assumed to be UTF-8.

num

function or named list applied to numerical (i.e., type num) questions. If num is a function, num will be used for generating the item body of the question, see function make_itembody_qti21(). If num is a named list, these arguments will be passed to function make_itembody_qti21().

mchoice, schoice, string, cloze

function or named list applied to multiple choice, single choice, string, and cloze questions (i.e., type mchoice, schoice, string, and cloze), respectively. See argument num for more details.

template

character. The QTI 2.1 template that should be used. Currently, the package provides "qti21.xml".

duration

integer. Set the duration of the exam in minutes.

stitle

character. A title that should be used for the sections. May be a vector of length 1 to use the same title for each section, or a vector containing different section titles.

ititle

character or NULL. A title that should be used for the assessment items. May be a vector of length 1 to use the same title for each item, or a vector containing different item titles. Note that the maximum of different item titles is the number of sections/questions that are used for the exam. Note, if ititle = NULL, simple numbering for the exercises will be used, however, if the exercise contains meta info extitle, this title will be used.

adescription

character. Description (of length 1) for the overall assessment (i.e., exam).

sdescription

character. Vector of descriptions for each section, omitted if empty (or NULL or FALSE).

maxattempts

integer. The maximum attempts for one question. This may also be a vector so that the maximum number of attempts varies across questions. A value of Inf or 0 signals that the attempts per question are not limited.

cutvalue

numeric. The number of points at which the exam is passed. If set to NULL (default) or equivalently NA, no cutvalue is set and the result of the exam is just the number of points.

solutionswitch

logical or character. Should the question/item solutionswitch be enabled? In OLAT this means that the correct solution is shown after an incorrect solution was entered by an examinee (i.e., this is typically only useful if maxattempts = 1). Furthermore, if e.g. solutionswitch = c("correct", "incorrect", "summary"), the correct solution can be either displayed when the answer is "correct" and/or "incorrect" and/or after the test is completed in the "summary" of the results.

casesensitive

logical. Should the evaluation of string exercises be case sensitive?

cloze_schoice_display

character. For schoice answers in cloze exercises, select the display of the possible answers. By default (cloze_schoice_display = "auto"), radio "buttons" are used if the answer list appears in its own paragraph and a "dropdown" menu is used if the answer list appears inline (and has no mathematical markup). Both options can also be enforced explicitly, independently from the answer list appearing in a separate paragraph or inline. Note that in dropdown menus the answer list will typically be rendered as plain text which means that mathematical notaion may become unintelligible.

copypaste

logical. For string/text responses, controls whether text may be copied into the text entry field, or must actually be entered.

navigation

character. Mode of navigation, can either be "nonlinear" (default) or "linear". The former means that test participants can switch back and forth between questions while the latter implies that the questions need to be answered sequentially.

allowskipping

logical. Can a question/section be skipped (default) or must it be answered?

allowreview

logical. Can questions be viewed again at the end of a test/exam or not (default)?

allowcomment

logical. Are comments allowed?

shufflesections

logical. Should the order of the exercises be shuffled? For selection = "pool" setting shufflesections = TRUE this corresponds to shuffling the sections that contain the pools of exercises. For selection = "exam" it corresponds to shuffling the exercises within each exam section.

zip

logical. Should the resulting XML file (plus supplements) be zipped?

points

integer. How many points should be assigned to each exercise? Note that this argument overules any exercise points that are provided within an "\expoints{}" tag in the .Rnw file. The vector of points supplied is expanded to the number of exercises in the exam.

eval

named list, specifies the settings for the evaluation policy, see function exams_eval.

converter

character. Argument passed on to make_exercise_transform_html. The default for converter is set to "ttm" unless there are Rmd exercises in file where "pandoc" is used.

envir

argument passed to xweave (which passes it to knit).

engine

argument passed to xweave indicating whether "Sweave" (default) or "knitr" should be used for rendering Rnw exercises.

base64

logical. Should supplementary files be embedded using Base 64 coding? Argument base64 may also be a character vector of file suffixes that should be encoded, e.g. base64 = c("png", "rda") will only encode PNG images and binary .rda files. If set to NULL only image files will be encoded.

mode

character. See function tth.

include

character, paths of extra files that should be included within the final .zip-file.

selection

character. If selection = "pool", the function creates one section for each exercise from which one replication will be selected in the exam. If selection = "exam" each section contains all questions and one section will be selected for the exam. The "exam" variant has the advantage that questions that build on each other can be used in the exam.

flavor

character. Which QTI 2.1 “flavor” should be used? Some learning management systems require that the QTI XML tags are used in a rather specific and idiosyncratic way. Typically, users should not set this argument directly but use the convenience interfaces such as exams2openolat instead (which use the flavor argument internally along with further customizations).

shuffle, defaultval, minvalue, maxvalue

arguments used for item construction, for details see the XML specification (see IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. 2012), especially Section 4.

enumerate

logical. Insert potential solutions in enumerated list?

digits

integer. How many digits should be used for num exercises?

tolerance

logical. Should tolerance intervals be used for checking if the supplied num answer/number is correct? The default is to use tolerance intervals if digits = NULL.

maxchars

numeric. Lower bound for the number of characters in fill-in-blank fields. The actual number of characters is selected as the maximum number of characters of this value and the actual solution.

...

further arguments passed on to make_exercise_transform_html.

Details

The Question & Test Interoperability (QTI) is an international XML standard for specifying e-learning tests established by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. (2002, 2012). The standard evolved over various versions with the first release culminating in the QTI 1.2 standard and the most commonly used stable version of the second release being QTI 2.1. While both versions share many similarities, they also differ in many details. Hence, separate functions exams2qti12 and exams2qti21 are provided. Moreover, due to the flexibility of the QTI standard, different learning management systems employ the standard in slightly different ways. Therefore, dedicated interfaces exams2canvas and exams2ilias (both based on QTI 1.2), and exams2openolat (based on either QTI 2.1 or 1.2) are provided for the learning management systems Canvas, ILIAS, and OLAT/OpenOlat, respectively. In addition, the interfaces exams2blackboard, exams2testvision, and the separate package exams2sakai started as forks of the exams2qti12 and exams2qti21 functions, respectively.

exams2qti21 produces a .zip file that may be uploaded into different learning management systems (see above). This includes the final XML file of the exam/assessment, its exercises as well as possible supplement folders that include images, data sets etc. It proceeds by (1) calling xweave for each exercise, (2) reading the resulting Markdown and/or LaTeX code using read_exercise, (3) transforming the Markdown/LaTeX code to HTML, and (4) embedding the HTML code in XML files using the QTI 2.1 standard for assessments and question items.

For steps (1) and (2) the standard drivers in xexams are used. In step (3), a suitable transformation function is set up on the fly using make_exercise_transform_html, see also the details section in exams2html. For step (4), the function will cycle through all questions and exams to generate the final XML files in QTI 2.1 format: separate XML files for each random replication of each exercise (labeled items in sections in QTI), one XML file tying the overall exam/assessment together based on the individual exercises and one overall ‘imsmanifest.xml’.

For arranging the individual exercise replications (called "items") in so-called "sections" two different types of selection are available: First, a "pool" of replications/items can be put into a section and then one item will be selected randomly for each participant from each section. As learning management systems typically sample the sections independently, this means that one participant might receive the first random replication from the first exercise but the third random replication from the second exercise, and so on. Alternatively, selection = "exam" specifies that each section contains a complete set of exercises and one section will be selected randomly for each participant. The "exam" variant is less commonly used but has the advantage that questions that build on each other can be used in the exam. Also, duplicated exercise types can be avoided when using nsamp to sample a certain number of exercises without replacement.

Templates other than the default qti21.xml provided in the xml folder of this package could in principle also be specified. However, adapting these is a bit technical. The assessment template must provide one section including one item. exams2qti21 will then use the single item template to generate all items, as well as the assessment and section specifications set within the template. Note that all specifiers that have a leading ## in the XML template will be replaced by suitable code in exams2qti21 and should always be provided in the template. Thus, the user may add additional tags to the XML template or modify certain specifications, like the number of replicates/items that should be sampled for each section etc.

By default, the individual question/item bodies are generated by function make_itembody_qti21 which checks the type of the question and will produce suitable XML code. Note that for each question type, either the arguments of make_itembody_qti21 may be set within num, mchoice, schoice, string and cloze in exams2qti21, by providing a named list of specifications that should be used, or for each question type, a function that produces the item body XML code may be provided to num, mchoice, schoice, string and cloze. E.g., mchoice = list(shuffle = TRUE) will force only multiple choice questions to have a shuffled answerlist.

Value

exams2qti21 returns a list of exams as generated by xexams.

make_itembody_qti21 returns a function that generates the XML code for the itembody tag in QTI 2.1 format.

References

IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. (2002). IMS Question & Test Interoperability: ASI XML Binding Specification Final Specification Version 1.2. https://www.imsglobal.org/question/qtiv1p2/imsqti_asi_bindv1p2.html

IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. (2012). IMS Question & Test Interoperability (QTI) XSD Binding Version 2.1 Final. https://www.imsglobal.org/question/qtiv2p1/imsqti_bindv2p1.html

Zeileis A, Umlauf N, Leisch F (2014). Flexible Generation of E-Learning Exams in R: Moodle Quizzes, OLAT Assessments, and Beyond. Journal of Statistical Software, 58(1), 1–36. doi:10.18637/jss.v058.i01.

See Also

xexams, ttm, tth, tex2image, make_exercise_transform_html,

Examples

## load package and enforce par(ask = FALSE)
library("exams")
options(device.ask.default = FALSE)

## define an exams (= list of exercises)
myexam <- list(
  "boxplots.Rmd",
  c("tstat.Rmd", "ttest.Rmd", "confint.Rmd"),
  c("regression.Rmd", "anova.Rmd"),
  c("scatterplot.Rmd", "boxhist.Rmd"),
  "relfreq.Rmd"
)

## output directory
dir.create(mydir <- tempfile())

## generate .zip with QTI 2.1 exam in temporary directory
## using a few customization options
exams2qti21(myexam, n = 3, dir = mydir,
  maxattempts = 3,
  num = list(digits = 1),
  mchoice = list(shuffle = TRUE, enumerate = TRUE)
)
dir(mydir)