Technical
QuickTri has three principal components:
Question Editor
The Question Editor is a WSIWYG design interface that facilitates the creation of a range of question types. Question interactions, images, video and text may be positioned anywhere on screen and a graphic toolkit is included within the design interface providing functionality for drawing, centring and cloning of objects to aid rapid production.
The system gives very fine control on the scoring within each question to allow the allocation of partial credit for partially correct answers and threshold values for competency testing.
The Question Properties dialog associated with each question, allows you to extensive control the way in which each question behaves when run live. This is important when designing questions to test higher level skills.
Feedback for formative use includes in-question response to a user-action and post-question automatic pop-up, tutor-defined page, external rich text file or web page.
Rapid production is facilitated by the functionality to save questions and question properties as templates for similar questions.
Questions may be previewed and live-tested from within the Question Editor.
Assessment Editor
The assessment editor allows you to select and sequence the questions for assessment delivery, define the way in which the assessment will run and package the assessment for delivery.
An easy-to-use menu system ensures that all necessary parameters have been set including screen backgrounds, sign-on and password entry parameters, question delivery mode, feedback mode, results file configuration and results file location.
Extensive functionality is provided for randomised question delivery including random selection from a bank, random selection from groups of questions, random selection of groups of questions, presentation of questions or groups of questions in set or random order. Benchmark questions that are to be delivered to all candidates can be included within an otherwise random selection.
Rapid production is facilitated by the functionality to save the assessment properties as a template for similar assessments.
Assessments may be previewed and live tested from the Assessment Editor.
When you are satisfied that all is running properly the assessment can be packaged for LAN / CD-ROM, Web or as a SCORM 1.2 object for upload to a VLE / LMS (eg Blackboard or Moodle). The system saves the package with all necessary assets in an appropriate folder.
Runtime engine
The runtime engine is common to the preview modes and the running of completed assessments. When an assessment is packaged in the Assessment Editor the runtime engine is packaged with them. The Runtime Engine reads the assessment configuration file and accesses the question files and various assets as required during the assessment delivery.
Question formats
QuickTri stores questions in its own format as ASCII or encrypted files. While we support the principle of interoperability standards for online assessments, we do not consider the QTI (Question & Test Interoperability) specifications to be sufficiently mature as yet for this to be the format for storage of QuickTri questions. As and when the situation changes, QTI import / export functionality is likely to be added to later releases of QuickTri.
