If you’ve ever had an issue pulling content into your course – especially assessment content the know you’re not alone. Assessment content can be a really great win for you and your time, especially if you’re looking to provide some low-level assessment to check for student comprehension or understanding of material.
The real problem is when you get them from the publisher and go to put them into your course site. Having played and worked with several learning management systems, I’m well aware of the phrase, “Not all learning management systems are created equal,” but I’m also aware that not all publishers are the same, nor is their implementation of standards, especially the QTI standard, used to provide formatting to assessments and the assessment question types so they’re portable and reusable in different learning management systems.
I’d like to say that there’s one full-proof/fool-proof way of doing this for every publisher, textbook, and question set – but there’s not. There are lots of great tools out there like these:
- Respondus
- Cognero
- TestGen
And yet sometimes it requires the use of multiple tools to get the assessment content into a course site. Here’s one such episode I recently encountered in an online course where the instructor needed multiple chapters of content imported from the newly minted next edition to the course and Cengage didn’t provide a Sakai labeled import file – just one for Angel and Blackboard (not even one for Canvas).
In short you may have to try several things or a combination of things. I’ve even taken content from one publisher in a format specific to another LMS, imported to that LMS, exported it and then was able to bring it into a course site. Just goes to show, nothing is standard in the world of publisher-created assessments, despite use of QTI as a standard.
If you have questions, or need help with importing your assessment content contact Dave Eveland of the Department of Online Education.
Johnson University Online Helps 