automating quiz generation
Jun 26, 2015
We are in the process of migrating to a new LMS system. Our previous LMS did not use SCORM, the new one does. We have a separate system used for testing which contains hundreds of tests (the testing system was internally developed). As part of the migration, we would like to package each test as a SCORM course. We are looking to standardize on Storyline for course authoring so converting the existing tests to Storyline 2 and then publishing as SCORM is desirable to aide in future maintenance of the tests.
I've explored exporting the tests from our custom system to a spreadsheet and importing into a Storyline 2 course using a standard template. This is problematic as most of the tests have multiple sections (which in Storyline would be multiple test banks and possibly multiple scenes). Also most test banks only display a random subset of questions but this can't be specified in the spreadsheet template. All of the functionality of our current testing system can be recreated in Storyline but the process can only be automated to a point - there will still be a lot of manual tweaking required after each import.
Has anyone gone down this road already? Are there any utilities that might help? Is there a published file format for say Quizmaker that I could write the tests out in and then import which would include additional properties? I realize this may not be a solvable problem but I would like to automate this as much as possible.
Thanks, Brian
7 Replies
The company I work for converted 120 legacy courses [from spreadsheets to SL1] for RBS in just over a week.
If your interested in such conversions get in touch if not good luck, it will require a lot of manual work.
Tim,
Was any part of your companies process automated?
No I think we just threw bodies at the problem. Some of the courses were
sent out to contractors to help speed up the process each team member was
assigned 15 or so courses to complete
Thanks, Tim. We may have to do the same. I can at least automate 80% of the migration using the spreadsheet template method which is a good start. Even if I did automate it a 100%, I'd still have to have the course owners validate so I may push the last 20% onto them.
Glad that Tim was able to pop in and provide a bit of feedback for you Brian. Hopefully others will chime in as well. Good luck with this undertaking :)
Hello, I am very interested in this. Has there been any progress made since this post was published?
We did not use the spreadsheet import. We developed a small set of webpages and javascript and then packaged the pages in Rustici Software's SCORM Driver resulting in a SCORM course. The tests were exported from our Testing App's database as xml and the javascript in the web pages was designed to read that xml. This allowed us to provide the full functionality of our old testing application in the course with a fully automated process (but manually verified). We just added a link to the storyline courses to launch the new SCORM course to get completion credit. That's a high level summary, there was more involved but overall this works well. but it is a solution specific to our unique environment, although the concept would work elsewhere.
This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.