A campus wide setup of Question Mark Perception (V2.5) at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) – facing a large scale implementation

The first part of this paper outlines the drawbacks of a large scale implementation of Question Mark Perception’s assessment software (QMP). The default publishing procedures offered by QMP, i.e. ODBC or disk sharing, do not meet the needs of global Internet accessibility and security. Academic staff members had to upload their session files by completing a web form; publishing requests were handled manually by members of the Computing Center’s staff. As on the server side all question and session records were stored in one single database, and graphics and multimedia files reside in one directory on the server, a cumbersome system of naming conventions was necessary to prevent files and database records from being overwritten. While creating questions with QMP’s authoring application – Question Manager – authors wanting to refer to graphics or multimedia files had to insert in a non-intuitive way the pathname of the graphics directory on the server. Moreover QMP’s server software never commits a delete transaction in the question database. This caused major problems for authors reloading assessments to the central database after having deleted one or more questions. To cope with these problems the Computing Centre of Leuven University has developed an upload application for use by the academic staff members. This application, which is described in detail in the second part of this paper, meets the constraints of a campus wide setup of QMP’s assessment software.