An investigation of the enhancement and the formal description of IMS/QTI specification for programming courses

Assessment plays an essential role in the educational activity, not only to verify the knowledge acquisition of learners, but also as a motivation factor. In this paper we consider the IMS/QTI specification. We first propose a formalization of the question structure in his specification based on ontology, representing its information model. Then we enhance this specification by adding new types of questions/interactions and apply them to an Object Oriented Programming (OOP) course. In this context, we specify a new type of interaction that we called "composite Text Interaction" and which can define questions of type "identify the errors in a program and correct them". The new type of question has been integrated into an editor for question construction supporting the IMS/QTI specification.