Building user-interfaces for IMS Specifications

IMS develops open technical specifications for interoperable learning technology. Several IMS specifications have become worldwide standards for delivering learning products and services. However, these specifications are difficult to use by people with rather simplistic technological background such as teachers, small learning institutions, and others.

In order to facilitate the dissemination of these standards, the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona has been working on a set of experimental tools that implement user interfaces for IMS specifications such as Question & Test, Learning Design, and Learning Design. Libraries where developed in Java to implement the functionalities associated with the specifications such as saving and instance of a schema, verifying the instance's compatibility with the specifications, and implementing the fields, data structures, and relations defined in the specifications.

The QAED tool is a complete user interface implementation that facilitates the creation and management of assessment repositories. It is based on the IMS Question & Test Interoperability specifications known as QTI-Lite. IMS specifications promote coordination between distributed learning environments and content from multiple authors. This tool was produced for the purpose of creating an e-learning framework and relies on a set of QTI-Lite Libraries to provide IMS specifications for the construction of assessment contents. These libraries mirror in their structure a direct mapping of the specification hierarchy into a set of Java classes. The QAed tool is a standalone application and undergoing efforts are transforming it to an open-source plug-in for service oriented architectures. In parallel, efforts are being applied to upgrade the libraries to QTI 2.0 specifications.

Experimentations with these tools are helping to design a schema to bring the IMS specifications a visage that can be utilized by novice learners or learning designers in producing, distributing, and consuming learning components in accordance with global specifications.