Sprinting to embed assessments and learning objectives with MIT, Lumen Learning, and OpenAssessment

Idea: Wouldn't it be cool to have a really easy way to embed interactive assessments in textbooks, epubs, and courses?

People: The folks I have just been meeting with thought so and we got together to explore a few prototypes. I have been in Salt Lake City working in the Marriott Library at University of Utah, hosted by David Wiley of Lumen Learning, and joined by Brandon Muramatsu and Cole Shaw of MIT's Office of Education Innovation and Technology (OEIT), Justin Ball and colleague James from Atomic Jolt consulting, and Tom Woodward of OERPUB via Daft Labs.

Scenario: The following scenario sets up our first exploration. Lumen Learning is adapting a biology textbook from Open Stax College. They are creating courseware for college faculty that takes each section and adds interactive, formative assessments, and discussions and analytics and other cool stuff. They are creating completely open banks of questions to go along with the books and these will live at openassessments.org. Open Assessments is building a quiz player that works like a youtube video player. You find a quiz you like and use a simple embed code to include that anywhere you want.

Exploration: So what we wanted to explore was including the ability to find and add a quiz from Open Assessments in the OERPUB editor. So, imagine you are creating a textbook section, or a learning activity for college biology and you have just written the section on parts of the cell, and you want to help students retain what they have learned. So you click on the 'quiz' button in the editor, and search for quizzes about cells, preview the quiz, and pop it in. This is what we put together yesterday. Keep in mind this is code written quickly to see how to do this kind of thing while we had all the experts together. It isn't polished and beautiful. But the impressive thing is that we got this done in a couple of hours. The following screen shots show what we did.

After clicking on the quiz widget in the editor, search
for "cells".

The search uses openassessments.org's API,
and returns one result. Click on "select" to preview it.

Preview the assessment to make sure it is what you want. The
preview is live, so you can check the answers and all the
questions in the quiz.

The quiz is embedded in the content and will play in the editor
and also in the textbook as long as there is an internet
connection. The quiz is being played by openassessments.org.
The actual quiz is stored as a qti file at openassessments.

Technical notes and links:

• The code is on the embed-quiz branch of the oerpub editor.
• Open Assessments is here and their API is documented here. Some of it changed just yesterday to make searching work and to implement oEmbed. Read more about that on Justin's blog about it.

Upcoming posts

• Linking to learning objectives using OEIT's MC3 service
• Embedding the editor in Wordpress so the math and assessments and other cool features could be used in Wordpress or Pressbooks.