I’m overdue for an update here on what I’ve been working on.  My current project is a web application for collaboratively sharing, critiquing and improving question items for homeworks and quizzes. Basically a wiki question bank, but more socially-oriented.

In my last post, I was working on Plone and the ECQuiz module of eduComponents.  After a few months I abandoned Plone and never looked back. Plone’s going through a big transition right now and it’s hard to be a newcomer to its scene.  I wish Plone and eduComponents developers well.

I switched my platform to Drupal and its Quiz module. Drupal has an amazing community.  It’s hard to measure a community, but a handy data point is that the Drupal group on Facebook has 3500 members, compared to Plone’s 500.  This Quiz module has an active forum, an IRC channel, and a longish history.

While the Quiz community is strong, its design is lacking for my purposes.  It began 3 years ago as a simple module and has been pulled and contorted over the years to suit different needs.  This is arguably the best way for an open source module to evolve.  Thanks to big contributions from Matt Butcher, the module got some big improvements in Quiz 3.0.  For example, there is now an object-oriented type system for question types so new ones can be added more easily.  (Unfortunately, Drupal data schemas don’t have inheritance like PHP objects do so data properties of the base class have to be included in each subclass.  Unless someone wants to hack around that.)  And now Sivaji is making yet more improvements for Quiz 4.x, as part of his winning GSoC proposal.  Quiz 4.0 will be a polished set of improvements at the end of this summer.

I’ve been exploring the potential for Quiz to take a leap forward by drawing in code from PHP-based learning management systems.  I began with Moodle and hammered its import/export code into Quiz to allow it to handle many more formats.  I was happy having materialized the possibility for re-use in open source, but overall pretty turned off by Moodle’s spaghetti codebase.  Maybe if you’re a longtime Moodle developer it all seems clean and clear, but that wasn’t my experience.  So I’ve kept looking.

ATutor looks promising.  It’s a leaner codebase and looks so far to be a clean design.  It also has much better support for standards, which is important for my question bank in order to interoperate with other systems.  After skimming the source code I realized I would need the db schemas to wrap my head around it so I installed the whole thing on my laptop.  Wow, that was easy.  I just moved the folder within my MAMP htdocs, navigated to it in my browser, and the rest was clicking through web forms.  (There was one step where I had to make a directory manually, but the directions were explicit enough for anybody.)  Thanks ATutor developers, and Happy Canada Day.

I may post again with an assessment.  Please reply in the comments if you’d like to hear this (and why would also help).