On 10 April 2017 at 10:57 Shani Evenstein <shani.even@gmail.com> wrote:

This is awesome Magnus!

Thanks so much for sharing.

 

Some additional comments, more from the Moodle angle (Moodle did actually prompt this whole line of thought).

The Comprende! tool gets its name, I think, from the "comprehension question", where the student reads some text, and is then asked about its content. Educators sometimes call this "knowledge review". Moodle lessons can do that, in an environment with complex navigation structures; currently Comprende! uses "next page", so has a simple linear structure. 

Therefore one future line of development would be to broaden navigational structures. If you think about "diagnostics" as an important educational function, it become clear that there is great value to be had in types of branching.

The main strategic idea is to develop a large-scale question database. That would have a number of applications (and would require complex queries to be available, to be directly useful to teachers and those using it for self-study). One aspect, familiar from Wikimedia Commons, would be to look for donations of material. The export from Moodle sites of quizzes is as Moodle XML; and some relevant parts of Moodle XML can be imported into Comprende! (in principle).

Comprende! produces a "quiz in a URL", which is therefore available to be added to the HTML of any webpage. There is also the question of quizzes in MediaWiki. You could call this "quiz in a box", because there is a strong parallel between putting a test on a MediaWiki page, from  Wikibase, and putting an infobox into Wikipedia, from Wikidata. Here Lua replaces Javascript. I gave a five-minute talk on this at WMUK's February education conference at Middlesex University: see

https://wikimedia.org.uk/w/index.php?title=Wikiqu

This project, WikiQu, has not kept pace with Comprende!: I'm working on it with User:RexxS (Doug Taylor), and those who know Magnus will forgive us, I think. So far, it can at least show you the Moodle XML if you enter a multiple-choice question, which is helpful in answering questions about compatibility between the two directions. The projects both can "speak Moodle XML".

So we are taking Moodle XML as a lingua franca: there really isn't a de facto standard for "questions as data", but Moodle XML is what there is. Other question languages (I have used GIFT for WMUK, and there are others) generally can be imported into Moodle; and therefore exported in Moodle XML translation. I'm labouring this point somewhat, because we want to emphasise reuse of educational material. Teachers traditionally do mashups - and it seems clear to me that we ought to build that concept into a Wikimedia edutech system.

There is more to say, but I'll close this with the thought that Wikibase, like Wikidata, offers chances for annotation, translation and collaboration on questions. 

Charles