Minibix: Item banking with web services

The Minibix system was developed from an existing prototype item bank system in use for high-stakes testing at the University of Cambridge. The system has been developed over the last year with support from the JISC e- Learning Programme. This project has redeveloped the system based on version 2 of the IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) specification and is publishing the resulting system under an open source license. In this paper, we propose a simple service model for describing the authoring, banking, test construction and delivery of assessment content. The item banking model is implemented by the Minibix system and will be demonstrated in conjunction with authoring, test construction and delivery systems developed by the sister projects: AQuRate (Kingston University) and AsDel (University of Southampton). These services, as part of a wider e-Framework, could enable tool integration on a scale suitable for interacting with large-scale item banks. Private banks are already used routinely in high-stakes summative assessment but open repositories of items for formative use are now becoming available. For example, the E3AN item bank for Electrical and Electronic Engineering or the item bank for the Physical Sciences recently announced by the HEA