Interoperability with CAA: does it work in practice?

IMS has been promising question and test interoperability (QTI) for a number of years. Reported advantages of interoperability include the avoidance of “lock in” to one proprietary system, the ability to integrate systems from different vendors, and the facilitation of an exchange of questions and tests between institutions. The QTI specification, while not yet an international standard for the exchange of questions, tests and results, now appears to be stable enough for vendors to have developed systems which implement such an exchange in a fairly sophisticated way. The costs to software companies of implementing QTI “compliance” in their existing CAA systems, however, are high. Allowing users to move their data to other systems may not seem to make commercial sense either. As awareness of the advantages of interoperability increases within education, software companies are realising that adding QTI import and export facilities to their products can be a selling point. A handful of vendors have signed up to the concept of interoperability and have taken part in the IMS QTI Working Group. Others state that their virtual learning environments or CAA systems are “conformant” with IMS QTI but do these assertions stand up when the packages are tested together? The CETIS Assessment Special Interest Group has been monitoring developments in this area for over a year and has carried out an analysis of tools which exploit the QTI specifications. This paper describes to what extent the tools genuinely interoperate and examines the likely benefits for users and future prospects for CAA interoperability

Catch My Fall: The Importance of Developing a Leadership Philosophy Statement in Sustaining Original Values and Leadership Direction

This article draws attention to the need and importance for chief executives to formulate a Leadership Philosophy Statement (LPS) as an aid to guiding them as they execute their duties of leadership. As companies adhere to mission statements (MS) which are developed to light the pathway to success, so too does the leader need a leadership philosophy to pursue that mission. The interconnectedness of organizational mission statements and individual leadership statements is highlighted to emphasize the importance of having related goals between leader and organization. The structure of the LPS as well as its content is discussed to better inform leaders of the best approach to writing a LPS

The organisational impact of open educational resources

The open educational resource (OER) movement has been growing rapidly since 2001, stimulated by funding from benefactors such as the Hewlett Foundation and UNESCO, and providing educational content freely to institutions and learners across the World. Individuals and organisations are motivated by a variety of drivers to produce OERs, both altruistic and self-interested. There are parallels with the open source movement where authors and others combine their efforts to provide a product which they and others can use freely and adapt to their own purposes. There are many different ways in which OER initiatives are organised and an infinite range of possibilities for how the OERs themselves are constituted. If institutions are to develop sustainable OER initiatives they need to build successful change management initiatives, developing models for the production and quality assurance of OERs, licensing them through appropriate mechanisms such as the Creative Commons, and considering how the resources will be discovered and used by learners

Conceptualising item banks

Sclater and MacDonald (2004) provide a simple definition of an item bank: a collection of items for a particular assessment, subject or educational sector, classified by metadata which facilitates searching and automated test creation. There is a need to define more closely the various elements and attributes of the item bank itself and to show how an item bank might fit into the larger picture of a distributed national (or even international) item bank infrastructure

Enhancing Moodle to meet the needs of 200,000 distance learners

In 2005 The Open University UK selected Moodle as the basis of its institutional virtual learning environment. Since then, the system has been integrated with existing elearning and administrative systems at the University and considerably enhanced during an extensive development programme costing around €8m and taking nearly three years. Many policy issues have emerged which needed to be tackled alongside the software developments in order for the platform to be adopted by the 7,000 tutors and nearly 200,000 students of the University. The Moodle system has proven to be reliable, scalable and customisable and has resulted in a more flexible system for the Open University than the commercial alternatives. This paper examines some of the many enhancements made to Moodle by the Open University, most of which have been fed back into the product for the benefit of other Moodle users. It describes some of the policy and pedagogical issues which have emerged during the roll-out of Moodle across the University