Wikisoba project

The Wikisoba project is a spin-off of the WMUK Virtual Learning Enviroment, a software development initiative concerned with developing lightweight course management tools.

Mark I tool

The Wikisoba tool authored by Magnus Manske in Javascript is hosted on Wikimedia Labs. It pulls in sections of any fixed MediaWiki site, displaying them in a plain skin; and interleaves them with questions written in GIFT format.

Mark II development plan

For the next step, some new principles are being taken into account.

Architecture proposal for Wikisoba project Mark II

Aspirations:

• The quiz component should move beyond online forms as the only type of input, to include drag-and-drop and clicks on images.
• The design should be engaging, intuitive, colourful, and suited to the tablet era.
• The range of questions should be much extended.
• The tool should be versatile as far as the question setter is concerned, and should offer varied question types, though complex instances will probably have to be limited to form input.
• Navigation through a quiz will be flexible, and done section by section, rather than being linear and start-to-finish
• The back office parts of the system will be able to handle scoring of quizzes, responses (i.e. feedback to answers), hints, progress tracking, badges, and notifications to authors.

Technical:

• The Mark II tool is conceived of as a Web app, supported by server-side code: see diagram for a proposed architecture.
• GIFT format, and possibly other markup quiz formats, will be offered as human-readable layers for authors, but will not be the underlying language of the system.
• The underlying layer of syntax should be JSON, and closely compatible with XML exported from Moodle.
• The working title for the underlying repository is "WikiQuiz".

Active pages

• /Initial proposal

Archived pages

• /Quizipedia