A Customisable Question and Answer Database Kate Lindsay

A Customisable Question and Answer Database

Kate Lindsay

Problem Domain

• More and more academics are wanting to give their students informal tests for practice purposes.

• Students are increasingly requesting resources to help them prepare for their exams.

Project

• Nuffield Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences required a system for delivering practice tests to students that - Allows lecturers to upload their own clinical

case studies with questions and answers without having to code. - Enables students to search for case studies and test their knowledge.

More than this . . .

• Build up trails of case studies to create a clinical case scenario.

• Enable lecturers to use and edit each other’s case studies whilst not changing the original.

• Upload a variety of multimedia to support textual info.

Technology

• ASP and SQL• Backend relational Access

database• HTML web pages incorporating

more complex HTML parameters for multimedia objects.

• Delivered via a Windows 2000 server.

Upload View

After an initial login lecturers will move through a series of pages to upload a case study.

Lecturer’s case studies will be available for others to duplicate and edit if they wish to include it in their own case scenario trail.

Include graphical, audio and video data.

These files are stored as a url in the database rather than binary data.

Simple metadata will be stored about any multimedia files.

Copyright very important.

After selecting how many questions will be attached to the case study, questions, answers and accompanying images will be uploaded.

Lecturer’s will be able to edit the order in which their case studies appear.

User view

Students can perform searches via different criteria .

Students will be presented with a case like this.

They can type in their responses if they so wish and check them against individual question answers or . . .

. . . Submit them

Summary

• ASP is a relatively simple means to create a dynamic question and answer system.

• The Case Scenarios Database could provide a shell for other subjects wishing to introduce a similar approach in their teaching.