Hélène Giroire

A practical approach to using the IMS-QTI specification

The advent of the web has deeply modified educational practices. Teachers and learners like having many exercises available for training or for assessing. A solution to this is to allow many authors to create and share resources; this involves gathering together several communities using the same format. A study of the most used LMSs has shown that IMS-QTI is the most accomplished specification to express interactive and parameterised exercises. Moreover, to ensure that instantiated exercises have the same level of difficulty, it is necessary to define constraints between parameters. But IMS-QTI is limited here. Therefore, we have extended IMS-QTI to express the constraints between interdependent parameters. To validate this approach, we have implemented tools for teachers: an editor for creating interactive exercises with constrained parameters and feedback; a translator of IMS-QTI files to play interactive exercises on the web without web services; a classification for storing the exercises. The proposed extensions have been agreed by the IMS-QTI group.

Targeted Detection: Application to Error Detection in a Pedagogical System

In a learning environment (tutorial system), the problem of the detection of students’ errors is fundamental. When an error is detected, the tutorial system can choose the best time to provide information and explanations in order to help the student make progress. The mechanism of error detection must be able to draw from knowledge about the studied domain and to adapt itself to various pedagogical strategies. In an interactive system, the problem of the detection of students’ errors arises in an incremental manner, at each input of information.

Towards Dynamic and Interoperable Educational Contents: Creating an Editorial Chain

The advance of technology has now made it possible for learners to learn at their own pace and at the time of their choice; they have at their disposal a variety of exercises created by pedagogues that enable them to acquire particular knowledge. Therefore, creating repositories of interoperable exercises is a challenge we must answer. Here, we describe an editorial chain which allows pedagogues to create patterns of exercises, the parameters of which are chosen in a given domain defined by constraints on these parameters. We discuss our choices - on the representation of the exercises (we choose to implement an extended IMS-QTI v2.1 specification); - on the execution of the exercises (using a clone engine or generating php or jsp files). Then, we show some examples.