{"id":446,"date":"2017-04-10T10:09:55","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T09:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.magnusmanske.de\/?p=446"},"modified":"2017-04-10T10:09:55","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T09:09:55","slug":"comprende","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/archives\/446","title":{"rendered":"Comprende!"},"content":{"rendered":"

tl;dr:<\/strong> I wrote a quiz interface<\/a> on top of a MediaWiki\/WikiBase installation. It ties together material from Wikidata, Commons, and Wikipedia, to form a new educational resource. I hope the code<\/a> will eventually be\u00a0taken up by a Wikimedia chapter, as part of an OER strategy.<\/p>\n

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The past<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>There have been many\u00a0attempts in the WikiVerse to get a foot into the education domain. Wikipedia is used extensively in this domain, but it is more useful for introductions to a topic, and as a reference, rather than a learning tool. Wikiversity<\/a> was an attempt to get into university-level education, but even I\u00a0do not know anyone who actually uses it. Wikibooks<\/a> has more and better contents, but many wikibooks are\u00a0mere sub-stub equivalents, rather than usable, fully-fledged textbooks. There has been much talk about OER<\/a>, offline content for internet-challenged areas, etc. But the fabled\u00a0“killer app” has so far failed to emerge.<\/p>\n

Enter Charles Matthews<\/a>, who, like myself, is situated in Cambridge. Among other things, he\u00a0organises the Cambridge Wikipedia meetup, and we do meet occasionally for coffee between those. In 2014, he started talking to me about quizzes. At the time, he was\u00a0designing teaching material\u00a0for Wikimedia UK<\/a>, using Moodle<\/a>, as a component in Wikipedia-related courses. He quickly became aware of the limitations of that software, which include (but are not limited to) general software bloat, significant hardware requirements, and\u00a0hurdles in re-using questions and quizzes in other contexts.\u00a0Despite all this, Moodle is rather widely used, and the MediaWiki Quiz extension<\/a> is\u00a0not exactly representing itself as a viable replacement.<\/p>\n

A quiz can be\u00a0a powerful tool for education. It can be used by teachers and mentors to check on the progress of their students, and by the students themselves, to\u00a0check their own progress and readiness for\u00a0an upcoming test.<\/p>\n

As the benefits are obvious, and the technical requirements appeared rather low, I wrote (at least) two versions of a proof-of-concept tool named wikisoba<\/a>. The interface looked somewhat appealing,\u00a0but storage is a sore point. The latest version uses JSON stored as a wiki page, which needs to be edited manually. Clearly, not an ideal way to attract users these days.<\/p>\n

Eventually, a new thought emerged. A quiz is a collection of “pages” or “slides”, representing a question (of various types), or maybe a text to read beforehand.\u00a0A question, in turn, consists of a title, a question text (usually), possible answers, etc. A\u00a0question is therefore the main “unit”, and should be treated on its own, separate from other questions. Questions can then be bundled into quizzes; this allows for re-use of questions in multiple quizzes, maybe awarding different points (a question could yield high points in an entry-level quiz, but less points in an advanced quiz). The separation of question and quiz makes for a modular, scalable, reusable architecture. Treating each question as a separate unit is therefore a cornerstone of any successful\u00a0system for (self-)teaching and (self-)evaluation.<\/p>\n

It would, of course, be possible to set up a database for this, but then it would require an interface, constraint checking, all the things that make a project complicated and prone to fail. Luckily, there exists a software that already offers adequate storage, querying, interface etc. I speak of WikiBase<\/a>, the MediaWiki extension used to power Wikidata<\/a> (and soon Commons as well).\u00a0Each question could be an item, with the details encoded in statements.\u00a0Likewise, a quiz would be an item, referencing question items. WikiBase offers a powerful API to manage, import, and export questions; it comes with build-in openness.<\/p>\n

The present<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>There is a small problem, however;\u00a0the default WikiBase interface is not exactly appealing for non-geeks. Also, there is obviously no way to “play” a quiz in a reasonable manner. So I decided to use my recent experience<\/a> with vue.js<\/a> to write an alternative interface to MediaWiki\/WikiBase, designed to generate questions and quizzes, and to play a quiz in a more pleasant way. The result has the working title\u00a0Comprende!<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, and can be regarded as a fully functional, initial version of a WikiBase-driven question\/quiz system. The underlying “vanilla” WikiBase installation is also accessible<\/a>. To jump right in, you can test your biology knowledge<\/a>!<\/p>\n

There are currently three question types available:<\/p>\n