There are a few repositories that have been created to provide increased access to open educational resources (OER) such as OpenStax (openstax.org), FlatworldKnowledge (flatworldknowledge.com), or LibreText (chem.libretexts.org). There are a few tools doing similar things in the assessment space, such as MyOpenMath (myopenmath.com), Oppia (oppia.org), H5P (h5p.org), or Open Assessments (openassessments.org). These tools provide platforms to facilitate the creation of resources. However, discoverability, reuse, moderation, and remixing of existing content could be improved in these tools. In addition, these tools do not address the issue of high stakes open assessment. For open assessment items, one of the challenges to overcome is student cheating. If assessments are open, students will have access to the questions in an online format (online quizzes or online homework assignments using open questions) which encourages student cheating.
Our proposed model and solution for open assessments is as follows:
1. There are two communities of openness, a public community and a teacher-only community.
a. The public community is open to everyone. This community contains formative assessment items that can be used anywhere as practice questions.
b. The teacher-only community is tightly restricted to teachers. This community contains summative assessment items that can be used in homework system problems, quizzes, or exams.
2. Interoperability standards are used
a. Quizzes can be imported using the quizzing and testing interoperability (QTI) standard
b. Quizzes can be taken from an LMS using learning tools interoperability (LTI)
c. Data is tracked using the Experience API (xAPI) data format
d. Practice questions can be embedded as an HTML5 object in textbooks, blog posts, webpages, etc.
3. Formative questions, quizzes, homework system sets, and exams can easily be shared, modified, and incorporated into existing courses within either community
My research focuses on xAPI and CALIPER enabled learning analytics dashboards. I am a co-founder of an open assessment company called Prendus with the purpose of increasing OER adoption.
