Open protocol for accessing question engines
History
Previously (2004 to early 2005) there was an attempt (by the Serving Maths Project, Gustav Delius and others) to create something called Remote Question Protocol. This was a web service interface designed to allow question from different question engines (for example AiM and STACK) to be included in Moodle quizzes. The effort ran out of resources at a time when the code was not in a working state. Several groups have an interest in getting RQP working again, although no one is currently working on it.
During 2005, The Open University (mainly Sam Marshall) developed in-house an online assessment system called OpenMark. Its architecture was of separate question engines and a test navigator, communicating via a web service link.
Then in May 2006, I (Tim Hunt) took over maintenance of the quiz module from Gustav. At which point I learned about RQP. I was immediately struck by how similar OM protocal and RQP were conceptually, although the differend in details.
Now (autumn 2006), the OU wants to be able to include OM question in Moodle quizzes. Our choices are to either
- change OM to use RQP; or
- change (add to) Moodle to support OM protocol.
We have pretty-much decided to do 2., because it is less work for us, and becuase OM protocol currenly works and RQP doesn't. Therefore, RQP implementing question engines will have to change anyway, and since OMP is conceptually similar to RQP, changing to OMP won't be much more work that changed to whatever the next iteration of RQP would have been.
By the way, we are hoping that it will prove possible to open-source OpenMark, which will increase the number of OMP compatible systems out there.
... to be continued. ...
