Step-by-step guide to generating, importing, and conducting online tests and quizzes generated by exams2blackboard() in R/exams.
Online tests and quizzes conducted in learning management systems are a highly useful tool for students to practice course and materials and for teachers to monitor the progress students make while working on their exercises. However, to allow for enough variation and avoid cheating among students, it is often necessary to generate a large number of variations of exercises for such online tests.
In the following it is demonstrated how R/exams and its exams2blackboard() function can be used to create “dynamic” online tests and quizzes as well as large item pools for the learning management system Blackboard. The discussion is based on experiences at the University of Amsterdam, in the Bachelor programme Child Development and Education, where Blackboard testing facilities are used extensively in courses in methods and statistics: Students make formative tests in their preparation of practicals, and teachers use student results to optimize the content of those practicals.
Testing in Blackboard
In the Blackboard system, the Tests, Surveys and Pools section can be accessed from the Control Panel under Course Tools.
If an exam created with R/exams is imported into Blackboard, the material will appear both in the ‘Tests’ module and ‘Pools’ module. Tests are sets of questions that make up an exam. Once an exam is created here, it may be deployed within a content folder for administering it to students. Test results appear in the Grade Centre, which is a spreadsheet-like database for storing student results. Pools are sets of questions that can be added to any Test, and are useful for storing questions in the system. So, R/exams may be used to either construct a full exam that can be readily deployed in Blackboard, or to create item pools that can be used as input for exams created within the Blackboard system itself. For documentation by Blackboard on its testing facilities, see the Blackboard Help pages.
Exercise types
In its testing facilities, Blackboard employs the international QTI 1.2 (question &amp; test interoperability) standard. However, as Blackboard created its own special flavor of QTI 1.2, it was not possible to simply use exams2qti12() from R/exams but it was necessary to create a separate function exams2blackboard(). This supports four types of R/exams exercises to be included in the Blackboard testing system:
R/exams name
Blackboard type
num
Calculated numeric
schoice
Multiple choice
mchoice
Multiple answer
string
Fill in the blank
The R/exams cloze type is part of the QTI 1.2 standard but not officially supported in Blackboard. Hence this type of item is not supported in the current version of exams2blackboard() either as no workaround for implementation in Blackbard has been found (yet).
For an overview of question types in Blackboard’s testing module, see Question types.
Creating a first exam
The first step in creating an exam is to construct its constituting questions; for an introduction into designing exercises using R/exams, see the First Steps tutorial. Next, the exercises are gathered into an exam. To that end, in R, after loading the R/exams package, a list of the exercise file names is created:
library(&quot;exams&quot;)
myexam