5.1 Qml 1.0 tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to create problemsets and write individual items, and how to embed them into other XMLdocuments. It is intended primarily for people involved in the Connexions Project.

Displaying qml

The Connexions project provides the ability to do simple response processing through stylesheets andJavaScript. Examples of QML items thus processed are available in the QML 1.0 examples module.

PLEASE NOTE: This response processing is intended for the student to do self-testing as he or she moves through modules.Any student with minor technological know-how can determine the answers to the questions by viewing the source file.Hence, if you do not want students to have easy access to the answers to the questions, do not include them in the QML -leave the key blank and do not put information in the feedback tags that will allow the student to determine the correctanswer.

Please also note that while the current Connexions response processing can determine whether answers to single-response,multiple-response, and single-response questions are correct, it does not process the responses to text-response questions (thisrequires high-level and very situation-specific software that we do not have plans to provide at this time). Instead, it onlyshows the general feedback.

Structural overview

In QML, items (test and homework questions) are either grouped together in a problemset or are written individually. Eachitem contains the question being asked of the user, the response options together with answer-specific feedback, ifany, general feedback, if any, and a key. The items can also contain hints and links to resources.

Problemsets and items

The first thing you need to do is decide whether your items should be grouped together in a problemset or not. If you arewriting QML with CNXML, you can only use items, and each item will go within a CNXML exercise tag. If you have a reason tologically group your items together ( e.g. they comprise a homework set) and you are not writing for CNXML, enclose them in a problemset. To write a problemset, all youneed to do is enclose your individual items within a problemset tag. If you are writing individual items and do not have a goodreason to group them together within problemsets, or you are using CNXML, write items without enclosing them within aproblemset tag.

Problemset

The problemset tag encloses one or more items, and has one optional attribute called id. If you will be making a number ofproblemsets and need to be able to reference them individually, you will want to add a unique id attribute to each of yourproblemsets to distinguish between them.