Integrating personalized medical test contents with XML and XSL-FO

BMC Medical Education

Software

Dennis Toddenroth¹  Thomas Frankewitsch¹  Martin Dugas² 

[1] IT-Zentrum of the Medical Faculty, University of Münster, Domagkstraße 5, 48149, Münster, Germany;Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Münster, Domagkstraße 9, 48149, Münster, Germany;

关键词: Learn Management System;    Structure Query Language;    Portable Document Format;    Graphical Medium;    Test Sheet;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6920-11-8

 received in 2010-07-13, accepted in 2011-03-01,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIn 2004 the adoption of a modular curriculum at the medical faculty in Muenster led to the introduction of centralized examinations based on multiple-choice questions (MCQs). We report on how organizational challenges of realizing faculty-wide personalized tests were addressed by implementation of a specialized software module to automatically generate test sheets from individual test registrations and MCQ contents.MethodsKey steps of the presented method for preparing personalized test sheets are (1) the compilation of relevant item contents and graphical media from a relational database with database queries, (2) the creation of Extensible Markup Language (XML) intermediates, and (3) the transformation into paginated documents.ResultsThe software module by use of an open source print formatter consistently produced high-quality test sheets, while the blending of vectorized textual contents and pixel graphics resulted in efficient output file sizes. Concomitantly the module permitted an individual randomization of item sequences to prevent illicit collusion.ConclusionsThe automatic generation of personalized MCQ test sheets is feasible using freely available open source software libraries, and can be efficiently deployed on a faculty-wide scale.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Toddenroth et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011