Mini-Demo

Assessment Input Structure

The Context

Traditionally, our assessment content would be placed directly into the book’s CNXML structure. In order to future-proof our titles, the content team decided to put all new title assessments into our OpenStax Exercises editor so that our textbook assessment can be utilized in future projects, courseware, and widgets.

The Challenge

The OpenStax Exercises editor has evolved separately from our textbook for a few years. It added more options for formatting outside of the common multiple-choice question structure. Our content team was also in the middle of refactoring our infrastructure for modifying XML, so we decided to establish a convention for input and assigning numbering.

The Approach

1. Using the Exercises editor, I created test exercises of all the possible inputs. I settled on four different styles: Multiple Choice, Multi-Part Question (MPQ) Multiple Choice, Free Response, MPQ Free Response. All could potentially have an introduction, question stem, solution, detailed solutions, figures, math, table, and tagging associated with the courseware product.

2. After creating test content, one of my developers and I mapped the inputs to the JSON file output. I created acceptance criteria for what must appear in the textbook content, how they should be labeled/defined in the HTML, how each question type should be numbered and where the numbering would appear.

3. The developer working with me on this project created the mechanism for transforming the JSON file to XHTML output. We are currently using the new transforming mechanism on 6 new titles being produced and have had minimal requests to change the formatting.

Looking Ahead

There are more robust options in the Exercises editor outside of just content structure. The next steps I hope to solve are the more robust tagging and linking to existing features in the book. This would require changes in the Exercises editor and potentially how we approach interlinking within a content structure.