Last week, our senior solutions architect, Nate Ober, participated in the aQTI Workgroup during the IMS Global Quarterly Meeting. As a part of Questar’s continuing efforts to develop common assessment standards, Nate will contribute his time and expertise to an ongoing IMS subgroup tasked with using HTML5 as a replacement for XML for an upcoming version of the IMS QTI® standard.
Nate Ober has been working in the assessment arena for 10 years. He served as an education specialist at the Utah State Office of Education where he was responsible for creating formative assessment and summative reporting systems and later at American Institutes for Research, or AIR, as senior technical project manager, before coming to work for Questar as a senior solution architect. He has more than five years experience designing solutions for QTI v2.0 and QTI v2.1 adoption in a number of arenas. With such a deep background in QTI, in particular, Nate’s timing in joining Questar worked out perfectly as we have continued to look for opportunities to get more involved with setting new industry standards.
The aQTI Workgroup is creating a number of subgroups to help shape the aQTI v3.0 standard. Within the aQTI Workgroup, the HTML subgroup will evolve the aQTI to deliver assessment items in a way that will allow them to be effortlessly imported and reused. Along with the work of the other subgroups, the HTML5 subgroup will address some of the most pressing needs of the assessment community: the ability to easily exchange all types of items, including those technology enhanced items (TEIs) that have been historically locked into a single provider ecosystem.
We’re excited to continue our work with IMS to advance progress toward our shared goals of improving education and reducing the burden on our partners to implement technology that meets the needs of students and teachers.