[QTI] a stripped down assessmentTest?

[Deryl Seale]

I know variations of this question have popped up on this list before,  
but I couldn't find any satisfactory answers in the archives.

I find the assessmentTest schema and packaging strategy to be fairly  
cumbersome for a lot of the operations we're implementing in our  
application, in particular the requirement of separating the items  
into separate XML files and metadata into a separate manifest file.

For example, we have a requirement to present an assessment in a  
machine readable format to upload to a scanning and scoring platform,  
which needs only to read in the questions to get their correct answers  
(in this case, multiple choice). It's burdensome to require a client  
to process an archive file, such as a ZIP or TAR file, then perform  
file operations, and then process the XML contents one by one -- being  
able to simply send a single XML file for a client to process would be  
much simpler.

Likewise, is there any way to embed the metadata in the test XML file,  
as opposed to placing it in a separate manifest file?  If I want to  
include this information for the above mentioned export function, it  
would be nice to be able to embed in directly in the assessment XML --  
the metadata structure is in its own namespace, so I don't see why it  
couldn't happily co-exist with the assessment XML.

In general, it seems like this export strategy makes things harder on  
the client, and I can't see any see any benefit to benefit to breaking  
up an assessment into a bunch of separate files.  Short of creating my  
own XML structure -- and I reluctant to do that and become  
"proprietary" -- I don't see any good way to make things simpler for  
consumers of QTI data.  Any helpful advice?

-- 
Deryl Seale -- Vice President, Technology
c: 734.883.9636
deryl.seale at intel-assess.com
www.intel-assess.com