In preparation for our first running our first live test of Rogo, we needed to get an exam paper that had been created in Questionmark Perception into Rogo. This seemed simple enough, simply by exporting the QTI XML from Perception and importing it into Rogo. This generally worked reasonably well, but there were a few issues that had to be dealt with:
- Not unsurprisingly, images needed special attention. The links to the images in Perception (e.g. “%SERVER.GRAPHICS%topicresources/1065007843”, where the number at the end is the topic id) were replaced (using a blanket find/replace) with “/media(/subdirectorypath)”, and the images copied into the appropriate subdirectory.
- There were some issues with tables where an image was shown side by side with the answer options, which required a hack in Perception. For some questions there were problems in the HTML in Perception (left over from the dark ages), so fixing the HTML in Perception fixed the import problems relating to this.
- EMQ feedback – the general question feedback from Perception is given as the feedback for all stems in Rogo, which does not have general feedback for EMQs. This can be fixed by removing the feedback from all except the last question, so that it just appears at the end of the responses. Alternatively, the feedback can be split up to give each stem its own feedback. Either of these options would be laborious for large numbers of questions, so the best long-term alternative may be to alter the import code to deal with this.
- MCQ feedback – when importing MCQs (including those created in Rogo, exported and imported back in without any modification), in which only general feedback is provided, the general feedback is put in the answer feedback for each answer and general feedback is left empty. This has been added to the Rogo Trac system (#683, https://suivarro.nottingham.ac.uk/trac/rogo/ticket/683)
- Correct answers for EMQs – after importing all the correct answers are set to A. This is also the case if a question is created in Rogo, exported from Rogo and imported back in. This issue was added to Trac (#682, https://suivarro.nottingham.ac.uk/trac/rogo/ticket/682) and has now been fixed by the Rogo team, presumably for a future release. For this assessment, fixing this was simply, but annoyingly, a case of going through all the questions and changing the correct answers.
- Rogo does not have a multiple MCQ question type, i.e. several MCQs that share the same stimulus and so are combined into a single question, so that it looks like an EMQ, but there are different answer options for each stem. Such questions are recognised as Matrix questions by Rogo when they are imported, but this format is not appropriate. There is no way of modifying an EMQ in Rogo so that subsets of the answer options are only available for certain stems. We have a large number of questions of this format, and currently the only option is to separate them out into MCQs, which is not a sustainable solution. Therefore, we may need to create a multiple MCQ question type, which hopefully would not be too difficult using the EMQ question type as the basis.
Having fixed all these problems, it seemed as though we had an exact copy of the assessment, with everything working as it should. The only difference between the questions as far as the students were concerned was that the multiple MCQ question (there was only one of this type in this paper) was split into 5 separate MCQs.
However, while running the assessment, we were to come across the Curious Case of the Disappearing Image, which, it turned out, was caused by a problem related to importing.