[Building Sakai] QTI 2.x authoring

[csev]

Adam, 

The "All Rights Reserved Uni Nottingham" licensing is a little unnerving for anyone thinking to deeply invest in such a product.  The problem is that if a bunch of schools work on it and make it better - then the University of Nottingham will sell it to the highest bidder.  Much like what happened to this product:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000510105914/http://www.prometheus.com/psup.htm

I would recommend *against* joining a closed-source consortium or investing any time or effort in a close-source consortial product - even if it is a university.

If on the other hand Nottingham wants to monetize their work - that is completely fair.  But then the way forward would be a professional quality cloud hosted environment where they function like a service provider/vendor and apply whatever Freemium model they like and plug in using LTI 1.1.  They should expect to work towards about 10 employees to reach escape velocity.  And before that they should do some product testing to see if it is worth the up-front investment.

What the closed-source / consortium model hopes to do is to have others do the work of completing the product and promoting the product to new customers and for the original creator to accrue all the benefit after others have taken the risks and made speculative investments.

In terms of models, closed source / fremium / cloud hosted is a fine model (Wikispaces, LectureTools).  Open source consortial model is OK too (Sakai, Kuali, Etc).  But closed-source consortial models that build valuable products generally have a pretty poor history in the university space - their success generally becomes their undoing.

In the early days of Sakai, we did not have a foundation to hold copyright so we made all the code copyright all four of the founding schools (UM, IU, MIT< Stanford) - because we figured that the four could never agree enough to sell the code.  And then once we had a foundation they all quit-claimed the code to the foundation.  It was important to have this "quit-claim" happen as quickly as possible.   We did not the lawyers at any of the four schools getting any ideas that they might monetize Sakai.

/Chuck

On Apr 16, 2012, at 6:09 AM, Adam Marshall wrote:

> Is this of any use?
>  
> http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nle/about/touchstone/
>  
>  
> adam
>  
> From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Mark Breuker
> Sent: 10 April 2012 10:04
> To: Sakai Developers
> Subject: [Building Sakai] QTI 2.x authoring
>  
> Hi all,
>  
> We currently are using a custom QTI 2.0 assessment tool based on the R2Q2 delivery engine (http://r2q2.qtitools.org).
>  
> Is anyone in the community involved in developing/using authoring tools for QTI 2.x? We are in need for such a tool and are looking for a viable solution. Preferable we would like to use an off the shelve tool but if it’s not available we are considering developing one based on the JQTI library.
>  
> Cheers,
>  
> Mark
> Mark Breuker
> Product Owner
> Tel.: +31 71 5451 203
> 
> Leidse Onderwijsinstellingen bv
> Leidsedreef 2
> 2352 BA Leiderdorp
> www.loi.nl
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