[Building Sakai] IMS Common Cartridge import problems

[Zach A. Thomas]

On Jun 23, 2010, at 11:47 AM, Keli Sato Amann wrote:

> So Sakai 2.7 with these two patches will support import of CC? And this was possible in Sakai 2.4 too?
> 
> I'm more curious than anything because in a former life, I worked at an educational publisher and it didn't seem like Sakai supported CC a couple years ago. Perhaps it did but it was untested at that time, or a new version was getting finalized. I haven't been keeping tabs on CC since changing jobs.
> 
> If someone can attest that this import works, seems like the foundation should announce that, if they haven't already. I know the publishers wanted this for a while and it would help them to support their Sakai customers. If someone does test this against the official test packages from the IMS and it passes, that is great.
> 
> One possible kink down the road is that while Tests and Quizzes (SAMigo) supports QTI 1.1, it expects quizzes to use those tags in a specific way and hasn't, up till now, supported the way that Respondus uses those tags. In SAMigo 2.8, we will give users a choice to designate which flavor of QTI they are importing--what we've been supporting as well as the way Respondus exports QTI. Would the importer need to be modified to support this as well?

Keli, I'm the one you spoke to back in your publisher days. The story is (unfortunately) the same now as it was then: I wrote a very crude parser before the CC spec was finished. It is able to unzip a cartridge and stick some of its files into Resources. It _might_ recognize web links. But it doesn't know about all the other good stuff that comes in a cartridge: QTI tests, forums, and it doesn't know anything about cartridge authorization. Considering it was never finished, this probably isn't a blocker, but I would be happy for this area to get some attention. I'm afraid I won't be able to work on it in the near-term.

cheers,
Zach