Thread:Project:Support desk/Open source exam and quiz banks: An idea for a new wiki

I am a college professor of physics who is concerned about the high cost of education. In the technical fields (math and science) there in more than enough information on the internet-at-large for a self-learner to acquire more than 50% of a four year college degree. Although the wikis (e.g. Wikipedia and Wikiversity) are still underdeveloped compared to the internet-at-large, we are approaching the point where this knowledge will also be available in a convenient form that is open source.

What is missing is a means by which a self-learner can easily document expertise in these subjects. Test banks are proprietary and carefully guarded by the publishers of textbooks.

Quizbank represents my effort to fill this need. The idea is to post these questions publicly and use software to first store the questions on a personal computer, and then to create wikitext that can be uploaded to a wiki and printed out as pdf files. I have already done that with a Matlab code that randomly selects questions and renders them in wikitext with pagebreaks such that all the multiple choice options are on the same page as the question. I am not a computer programmer and my software is hard to use.

Here are some challenges that need to be addressed in the future, if this idea is to take off:
 * 1) The Matlab software that retrieves and randomly selects questions from a copy of the quizbank that resides on a personal computer creates textfiles that must be uploaded to a wiki and then rendered as wikitext that can be printed.  At the moment this is a public action.  We need to arrange for these exams to be written and printed out in secret.  I am able to do this because I am a Wikiversity custodian who can hide edits soon after they are made.  And I make my exams many months in advance, and have only a small number of students.  It is highly unlikely they would monitor my efforts and attempt to capture an exam as I write it.  (Also, why cheat if the questions are already available?)
 * 2) Teachers need to write test questions differently. One issue is the reluctance of students to ready anything.  I tried to write tests based on Wikipedia articles, but found that all but the most dedicated students preferred to simply study the testbank.
 * 3) One remedy is to select two or three questions from each exam and ask students to explain them in a short paragrah. ** Another remedy is to include written passages as part of the question. A large number of questions would be associated with that passage. As students prepare for the exams by reading the passage, they might find it easier to understand the passage than to attempt to memorize all the answers.
 * 4) Another remedy is to require that students propose questions. The grading of such efforts is quite useful for any instructor who is a contributor to this bank.  A related homework exercise for students is to verify that questions written for a specific Wikipedia article are still valid after the article has undergone a series of edits.
 * 5) Another relatively trivial challenge is making the open source exam bank compatible with the conventional "secret" banks already available. The expectation is that colleges and universities would use the open source testbank as only a portion of the grade assessment and certification.  There will always be room for those "secret" questions that only the instructor knows about.

There is no great rush to solve these problems. I am still struggling to get a small version of the quizbank prepared for the four courses that I teach. Serious work needs to be performed after I have established that this is a good way to teach. But if anybody has any suggestions, please let me know. I am only vaguely aware of what sort of extensions can be written because I am not really a programmer.