eTests
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Vincke, Grégoire
eTests is a PHP/MySQL platform i developped during my PhD in science didactic at the University of Namur. It is used there since 3 years, and is now deployed at the Catholic University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve and Wolluwe). This application offers opportunities to collaborative work on formatives as certificatives tests using multiple choices questions. It's not only a new quizz tool. It's a real university level research tool in education science, as it offers to teachers and reserchers tools to analyse answers in a global way and diagnose difficult topics and learning obstacles. As some PhD projects, I'm actualy alone to develop this platform. My goal in presenting it to FOSDEM is to find some interested developpers, at least to have technical as conceptual discussions about it, and with some chance, to find possibles teammates. The source code has been published on sourceforge under EUPL (European Union Public Licence version 1.1).
 So I'm Gregora, I will speak about E-Test, which is a software for formative evaluation using multiple choice questions on the internet. So here is the context. It started in January 2008. I was teaching assistants in biostatistics at the University of Camry in Belgium in the French part. And as a PhD student, I tried to study didactic statistics. So the way we have to teach the statistic to students. And one of our goal was to detect the difficult task, the task which are difficult for the students and we used multiple choice questions for that. So we had some requirements for this project. We wanted to put the questions online. We want a version control system to track the modifications by the different teachers on the questions. We want to share the questions between courses and the copy paste is not an option for sharing. We want to control the access to the questions. Sometimes we want to put some free on the internet and sometimes we want to check the access for the user based on login password or IPs. And a strange stuff we didn't see anywhere. We want sometimes to have more than one user authenticated on a single browser. Why? Because I'm not in New York country but in my university I have some labs. For example, there are 10 computers and you have 25 students. So I must allow the 25 students to use the 10 computers. So there must be two or three in front of the screen and have to record their underwear on their own sessions at the same time. We also wanted to provide sometimes a question on screen and sometimes on paper. Some papers, the students receive the paper with the question written on it and just have to record the answers. And like it's for formative evaluation, we want to instant feedback to students and global answer analysis for teachers. So I will not detail all the options but I will focus my presentation on main concepts. The first one is when we check all the learning managing systems that we founded to eventually use them to this project. We had a problem because in the main learning managing systems, the main entity is the courses for a teacher. And generally a course is a closed space. You have a folder to put some documents, some links, you have some tools to build some exercise and stuff like this. But it's quite difficult and sometimes impossible to share your contents. You're built in one course to another course. And we have some teachers which have several courses, for example five or six or for the same teacher and he has to duplicate all these contents in the different course spaces. So it's not very useful and there were not content version control neither. So for this project, we work in a different way. We create another entity. The entity was called the subjects. For example, competing science or statistic science and all the contents made by teachers is not anymore in the course space. It's in the subject space. So all the course are linked to a subject. All teachers are collaborators in the same space and each content that each teacher is created can directly be shared with the other teacher of the other course which I quite linked to the subject. And one subject can be one course can be linked to several subjects. For example, the first one here, SBOB 324 is in fact a course of bioinformatics. So it's used some computing and statistics and sometimes biology. So it can link the teacher, can link his course to several subjects to be able to use the contents that all the teachers are sharing with him. And another stuff which quite useful, it's in the site, the platform, you can create several institutions which are hosting several courses. Here in an example, at the University of Namir, we work with the high school of Louvain Eno and the courses of this high school can be linked to the subject inside the same platform. The user can be synchronized by LDAP server, etc. So in the home page, it looks like this. This is the home page of the platform. You can see the list of the courses of two subjects here. It's in French because it's a French speaking in university but it's not very important for this presentation. So you can see animal biology as the first subject in front of the red dot and the bio statistics as the second row. And you can see that the courses here are from the high school and all these ones are from the University of Namir and all these contents are shared. The second main concept is the distinction between question surveys and instantum surveys. If you take a list of questions inside a subject, for example, question one, question one, question two, question one, question two because they are controlled or shown, you can create a survey. So there is just a list of selected questions to use in quite a situation. But when you share your surveys, you have to pay attention and some teachers may want to deliver the survey to their students in different conditions. For example, here are two examples, the first one wanted to let the students access the question one by one on the screen and he let the question access on public access on these courses. And another one may want to deliver the questions after authentication and only on paper. So on the screen it's like this. This is a question on screen. You have all the details, the context, the questions, the propositions and a lot of other stuff, for example, degrees of certainty that you can associate it to your answer. And here is a screen when you have the questions on paper. Students receive printed paper with the questions on it and the number which it identifies the order in which the questions are put to not allow them to copy and paste the grid of the next student. And there is a version control of the question. So if someone actually now changed the question seven, which is switches from version 1.1 to version 1.2, the teacher we have created the survey can decide if he synchronized the question to the latest stable version or not. And it's the same for the instance. So each teacher which uses the questions decide himself if he takes the last version of the question or not. For example, here the survey has been synchronized and the instance once also, but the teacher here preferred to use the last version of the question, but it's the own choice. And when you edit a question, you have a box over there which lists all the surveys and the instance where your question is used. And if I update this version, which is 1.2, it would become 1.3 and all the area here will become checkbox and with selecting the different checkbox I can synchronize all the surveys or surveys instance, for example. And we need to have more than one user authenticated simultaneously on the same browser because sometimes we didn't have some place enough or a computer in us for all the students, but also sometimes on the student space you have only one computer and you have some files and you want your friends to work with you. But if in a classical learning-managing system, only one of them can log into the platform, so only one account will be linked to the answer they record. So we wanted each teacher, each students to work on the same computer. So take an example. Here is a student well-known, which is Harry Potter, logged in the Grafender house during an exercise late at night. And he started because his friends are not there. But I am mining and running are coming from a critic match. So he said, okay, no problem. I will invite you in my session here. You can put your login and password. And when three of them are logged in, all the fields are multiplied by the numbers of logged user in this window of the browser. So they can choose their own answer where they are not forced to have a common decision of the answer to record to the one on which is logged in. The feedback are quite classical to the students. There is a detail here of the points, when or lost at each questions. When your answer is incorrect, you have a red box and a justification, also a green box if it's correct. You can choose to see the justification. First of all, the justification was always displayed, but the students asked us to hide it because it says we wanted to retry by ourselves without having information of why we have the wrong answer. We want to learn. So please hide this box of justification and let it be displayed only on demand. And they can consult their results and compare their answer to the distribution of answer of other students of the same groups or same sections. It can be set by the teacher. For example here, the student here has selected answer three, but the corrected was a five and you can see that is part of the 10% of the students we have the wrong answer, which is quite bad. Sometimes we have the wrong answer, but you can see that the major part of the students are also wrong, which is less important. And there is a tool for collaboration between students. They can write their own correction for the exercise and decide if this correction is in read only for them, shared in read only for the other students or shared in read and write pervations. And for the feedback for the teacher, it's quite more complex. So I will not detail all the stuff here, but for a teacher who is quite aware about a geometric, he will find a lot of information to judge the quality of his questions, the quality of his survey, the fact that the students had learned something regarding to the results of the questions, et cetera. And there is a lot of export of files for the air scripts to analyze this further and building some reports for other reaches, for example. Regarding to the codes, the code is in procedural PHP, procedural because we wanted to the colleagues to put the end into the code and we judge that the oriented object was quite sometimes more complex for non-professional developers. The templates is Engine by Smarty, Ajax is based on prototypes and Scriptaculous, and the database is in MySQL, in MyAsum Engine for the same reason because we work a lot with emerging countries and we wanted small institutions to be able to host the application on quite basic server, on the basic offers of the host of the country. So when we started this project, you know, DB was not offered everywhere. During the license, it's a European Union public license which is a public license which has been made by the European Union to allow the institutions of the European Union to publish opens with code and it's translated in all the language of the countries, the European Union, and quite well adapted to the European Union laws. Actually the project is hosted on Sourceforge in this version quite stable. It's actually used by two universities in Belgium which represents, depending of the year, between 1,000 to 3,000 user per year. So it's quite stable, but I let it in pre-alpha because I still thinking that it's missing important functionalities like an installer, like a more precise permission control for the teacher regarding to the contents. And more question types, actually there is only multiple choice questions with unique answers. We wanted to have some multiple choice questions with multiple answers, open questions, fill in the holes and all like this. Actually the interface is only in French, but English file is in progress normally for the next release which will occur in one or two weeks. So like any other projects which are presenting in lining tools, help is wanted. First of all for share ideas and experience because actually it's only me, myself and I which are in this project and sometimes I want to share experiences made by other user on other platform, the same platform on using MQC or not into teaching or in programming. Help is also needed in coding for cleaning and new functionalities as usual, taming, translation, documentation, everything is well, will be welcome. So you can contact me at gregor.ving.gmail.com or gregorving.be and I will hand my presentation by some all my knowledge for my director of research and all my colleagues which helped me during this research and mainly the NAMM-Linux user groups which is also involved here in FOSM and the FOSM for the presentation sites. If you have some questions, I'm free for that. Any questions? Size of the code base, good questions, around 40,000 lines. I tried to calculate it without the library is important for other projects but it's between 14,000, 15,000 lines of PHP code. But maybe it can be reduced if it's more cleaner in the syntax. Other questions? The question is open for Clarenine because Clarenine is at a period of his life. It will shift between technologies, between home-made PHP scripts to symphony for example for the next version but it's in project. It's one of the main goals we had for the future. It's to build a module for important tools in model of Clarenine, not only Clarenine but other learning-managing system. But we tried, as it was for research, at the first step we want to be master of the code and the behaviors so it has been made a choice to build an application which is working alone. But help for building modules will be very, very welcome. Thank you very much again. And here's a box of tokens. Enjoy. I'm sure you've been looking. Thank you. Thank you very much again. And here's a box of tokens. Enjoy. I'm sure you've been looking. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
 So I'm Gregora, I will speak about E-Test, which is a software for formative evaluation  using multiple choice questions on the internet.  So here is the context.  It started in January 2008.  I was teaching assistants in biostatistics at the University of Camry in Belgium in the  French part.  And as a PhD student, I tried to study didactic statistics.  So the way we have to teach the statistic to students.  And one of our goal was to detect the difficult task, the task which are difficult for the  students and we used multiple choice questions for that.  So we had some requirements for this project.  We wanted to put the questions online.  We want a version control system to track the modifications by the different teachers  on the questions.  We want to share the questions between courses and the copy paste is not an option for sharing.  We want to control the access to the questions.  Sometimes we want to put some free on the internet and sometimes we want to check the  access for the user based on login password or IPs.  And a strange stuff we didn't see anywhere.  We want sometimes to have more than one user authenticated on a single browser.  Why?  Because I'm not in New York country but in my university I have some labs.  For example, there are 10 computers and you have 25 students.  So I must allow the 25 students to use the 10 computers.  So there must be two or three in front of the screen and have to record their underwear  on their own sessions at the same time.  We also wanted to provide sometimes a question on screen and sometimes on paper.  Some papers, the students receive the paper with the question written on it and just have  to record the answers.  And like it's for formative evaluation, we want to instant feedback to students and  global answer analysis for teachers.  So I will not detail all the options but I will focus my presentation on main concepts.  The first one is when we check all the learning managing systems that we founded to eventually  use them to this project.  We had a problem because in the main learning managing systems, the main entity is the courses  for a teacher.  And generally a course is a closed space.  You have a folder to put some documents, some links, you have some tools to build some exercise  and stuff like this.  But it's quite difficult and sometimes impossible to share your contents.  You're built in one course to another course.  And we have some teachers which have several courses, for example five or six or for the  same teacher and he has to duplicate all these contents in the different course spaces.  So it's not very useful and there were not content version control neither.  So for this project, we work in a different way.  We create another entity.  The entity was called the subjects.  For example, competing science or statistic science and all the contents made by teachers  is not anymore in the course space.  It's in the subject space.  So all the course are linked to a subject.  All teachers are collaborators in the same space and each content that each teacher is  created can directly be shared with the other teacher of the other course which I quite  linked to the subject.  And one subject can be one course can be linked to several subjects.  For example, the first one here, SBOB 324 is in fact a course of bioinformatics.  So it's used some computing and statistics and sometimes biology.  So it can link the teacher, can link his course to several subjects to be able to use the  contents that all the teachers are sharing with him.  And another stuff which quite useful, it's in the site, the platform, you can create  several institutions which are hosting several courses.  Here in an example, at the University of Namir, we work with the high school of Louvain  Eno and the courses of this high school can be linked to the subject inside the same platform.  The user can be synchronized by LDAP server, etc.  So in the home page, it looks like this.  This is the home page of the platform.  You can see the list of the courses of two subjects here.  It's in French because it's a French speaking in university but it's not very important  for this presentation.  So you can see animal biology as the first subject in front of the red dot and the bio  statistics as the second row.  And you can see that the courses here are from the high school and all these ones are  from the University of Namir and all these contents are shared.  The second main concept is the distinction between question surveys and instantum surveys.  If you take a list of questions inside a subject, for example, question one, question one, question  two, question one, question two because they are controlled or shown, you can create a  survey.  So there is just a list of selected questions to use in quite a situation.  But when you share your surveys, you have to pay attention and some teachers may want  to deliver the survey to their students in different conditions.  For example, here are two examples, the first one wanted to let the students access the  question one by one on the screen and he let the question access on public access on these  courses.  And another one may want to deliver the questions after authentication and only on paper.  So on the screen it's like this.  This is a question on screen.  You have all the details, the context, the questions, the propositions and a lot of other  stuff, for example, degrees of certainty that you can associate it to your answer.  And here is a screen when you have the questions on paper.  Students receive printed paper with the questions on it and the number which it identifies the  order in which the questions are put to not allow them to copy and paste the grid of the  next student.  And there is a version control of the question.  So if someone actually now changed the question seven, which is switches from version 1.1  to version 1.2, the teacher we have created the survey can decide if he synchronized the  question to the latest stable version or not.  And it's the same for the instance.  So each teacher which uses the questions decide himself if he takes the last version of the  question or not.  For example, here the survey has been synchronized and the instance once also, but the teacher  here preferred to use the last version of the question, but it's the own choice.  And when you edit a question, you have a box over there which lists all the surveys and  the instance where your question is used.  And if I update this version, which is 1.2, it would become 1.3 and all the area here  will become checkbox and with selecting the different checkbox I can synchronize all the  surveys or surveys instance, for example.  And we need to have more than one user authenticated simultaneously on the same browser because  sometimes we didn't have some place enough or a computer in us for all the students,  but also sometimes on the student space you have only one computer and you have some files  and you want your friends to work with you.  But if in a classical learning-managing system, only one of them can log into the platform,  so only one account will be linked to the answer they record.  So we wanted each teacher, each students to work on the same computer.  So take an example.  Here is a student well-known, which is Harry Potter, logged in the Grafender house during  an exercise late at night.  And he started because his friends are not there.  But I am mining and running are coming from a critic match.  So he said, okay, no problem.  I will invite you in my session here.  You can put your login and password.  And when three of them are logged in, all the fields are multiplied by the numbers of  logged user in this window of the browser.  So they can choose their own answer where they are not forced to have a common decision  of the answer to record to the one on which is logged in.  The feedback are quite classical to the students.  There is a detail here of the points, when or lost at each questions.  When your answer is incorrect, you have a red box and a justification, also a green box  if it's correct.  You can choose to see the justification.  First of all, the justification was always displayed, but the students asked us to hide  it because it says we wanted to retry by ourselves without having information of why we have  the wrong answer.  We want to learn.  So please hide this box of justification and let it be displayed only on demand.  And they can consult their results and compare their answer to the distribution of answer  of other students of the same groups or same sections.  It can be set by the teacher.  For example here, the student here has selected answer three, but the corrected was a five  and you can see that is part of the 10% of the students we have the wrong answer, which  is quite bad.  Sometimes we have the wrong answer, but you can see that the major part of the students  are also wrong, which is less important.  And there is a tool for collaboration between students.  They can write their own correction for the exercise and decide if this correction is  in read only for them, shared in read only for the other students or shared in read and  write pervations.  And for the feedback for the teacher, it's quite more complex.  So I will not detail all the stuff here, but for a teacher who is quite aware about a  geometric, he will find a lot of information to judge the quality of his questions, the  quality of his survey, the fact that the students had learned something regarding to the results  of the questions, et cetera.  And there is a lot of export of files for the air scripts to analyze this further and  building some reports for other reaches, for example.  Regarding to the codes, the code is in procedural PHP, procedural because we wanted to the colleagues  to put the end into the code and we judge that the oriented object was quite sometimes  more complex for non-professional developers.  The templates is Engine by Smarty, Ajax is based on prototypes and Scriptaculous, and  the database is in MySQL, in MyAsum Engine for the same reason because we work a lot  with emerging countries and we wanted small institutions to be able to host the application  on quite basic server, on the basic offers of the host of the country.  So when we started this project, you know, DB was not offered everywhere.  During the license, it's a European Union public license which is a public license which  has been made by the European Union to allow the institutions of the European Union to  publish opens with code and it's translated in all the language of the countries, the  European Union, and quite well adapted to the European Union laws.  Actually the project is hosted on Sourceforge in this version quite stable.  It's actually used by two universities in Belgium which represents, depending of the  year, between 1,000 to 3,000 user per year.  So it's quite stable, but I let it in pre-alpha because I still thinking that it's missing  important functionalities like an installer, like a more precise permission control for  the teacher regarding to the contents.  And more question types, actually there is only multiple choice questions with unique  answers.  We wanted to have some multiple choice questions with multiple answers, open questions, fill  in the holes and all like this.  Actually the interface is only in French, but English file is in progress normally for  the next release which will occur in one or two weeks.  So like any other projects which are presenting in lining tools, help is wanted.  First of all for share ideas and experience because actually it's only me, myself and  I which are in this project and sometimes I want to share experiences made by other  user on other platform, the same platform on using MQC or not into teaching or in programming.  Help is also needed in coding for cleaning and new functionalities as usual, taming,  translation, documentation, everything is well, will be welcome.  So you can contact me at gregor.ving.gmail.com or gregorving.be and I will hand my presentation  by some all my knowledge for my director of research and all my colleagues which helped  me during this research and mainly the NAMM-Linux user groups which is also involved here in  FOSM and the FOSM for the presentation sites.  If you have some questions, I'm free for that.  Any questions?  Size of the code base, good questions, around 40,000 lines.  I tried to calculate it without the library is important for other projects but it's between  14,000, 15,000 lines of PHP code.  But maybe it can be reduced if it's more cleaner in the syntax.  Other questions?  The question is open for Clarenine because Clarenine is at a period of his life.  It will shift between technologies, between home-made PHP scripts to symphony for example  for the next version but it's in project.  It's one of the main goals we had for the future.  It's to build a module for important tools in model of Clarenine, not only Clarenine but  other learning-managing system.  But we tried, as it was for research, at the first step we want to be master of the code  and the behaviors so it has been made a choice to build an application which is working alone.  But help for building modules will be very, very welcome.  Thank you very much again.  And here's a box of tokens.  Enjoy.  I'm sure you've been looking.  Thank you.  Thank you very much again.  And here's a box of tokens.  Enjoy.  I'm sure you've been looking.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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