openedu-qconv

Question format conversion and processing

The Question Converter is used to manage questions. The main purpose is to convert questions from the Storage Format (i.e. Markdown for Open-Education-Hub, or any other format you might choose) to the Deployment Format (e.g. Moodle XML if you use Moodle).

The converter uses an intermediary json format, so if a new question format is needed, it can be easily added by providing the newfmt_to_json() and json_to_newfmt() functions.

Requirements

All the requirements are found in the Makefile and can be installed using:

make install

Usage

You can run the script with the following command:

python3 src/question_converter.py

To get the full usage instructions, you can run:

python3 src/question_converter.py convert --help

Usage: quiz_manager.py convert [OPTIONS]

  Converts files to different formats.

Options:
  -i, --input-file TEXT           Input file path
  -d, --input-path TEXT           Input directory (read all `.input_format`
                                  files from the input path)
  -o, --output-file TEXT          Output file path
  -od, --output-path TEXT          Output directory (write questions in
                                  `Question_Title.output_format` files)
  -if, --input-format [JSON|XML|MD]
                                  The input format
  -of, --output-format [JSON|XML|MD]
                                  The output format
  -c, --category TEXT             Category specifier for XML quizzes
  --help                          Show this message and exit.

In order to specify input files, you can use the --input-file or the --input-path options.

The --input-file option will expect the path to a file that contains one or multiple questions. In Markdown, multiple questions in the same file are separated by two empty lines. If you have multiple questions, one saved in each file, you can use the --input-path option.

This will expect a path to a directory which contains multiple .md, .xml or .json questions.

Similar to the input files, you can save the output in one file, using the --output-file option, or in a directory which will contain multiple files, each with one question, using the --output-path option.

For example, if we want to convert to Moodle XML all the questions from the Operating Systems class, the app-interact chapter, we will run:

python3 src/question_converter.py convert --input-path <path-to-operating-systems-repo>/content/chapters/app-interact/lab/quiz/ --input-format md --output-file questions.xml

This will create the questions.xml file, that will contain all the questions from the io/lab/quiz/ directory, converted to the Moodle XML format:

  [...]
  <question type="multichoice">
    <name>
      <text>File Descriptor of `stderr`</text>
    </name>
    <questiontext format="markdown">
      <text>Which file descriptor is associated by default to `stderr`?</text>
    </questiontext>
    <tags/>
    <generalfeedback format="markdown">
      <text/>
    </generalfeedback>
    <single>true</single>
    <shuffleanswers>true</shuffleanswers>
    <answer fraction="0" format="markdown">
      <text>it varies from process to process</text>
    </answer>
    <answer fraction="0" format="markdown">
      <text>it varies from one Linux distribution to another</text>
    </answer>
    <answer fraction="0" format="markdown">
      <text>`stderr` has no associated file descriptor</text>
    </answer>
    <answer fraction="100.0" format="markdown">
      <text>2</text>
    </answer>
    <answer fraction="0" format="markdown">
      <text>0</text>
    </answer>
    <answer fraction="0" format="markdown">
      <text>1</text>
    </answer>
  </question>
  [...]

The questions.xml file can then be imported into Moodle and all the questions will be added to the question bank.

If, on the other hand, we export some questions from Moodle, and we want to convert them to Markdown questions, we can use:

python3 src/question_converter.py convert --input-file questions.xml --output-path test_output/ --output-format md

This will populate the test_output/ directory with Markdown questions:

$ ls -l test_output/
total 96
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  572 sep  8 11:14 Cause_of_bind_Error.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  928 sep  8 11:14 Client-Server_Number_of_Copies.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  657 sep  8 11:14 Deluge_TCP_or_UDP.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  835 sep  8 11:14 Effect_of_execve_Syscall.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 1179 sep  8 11:14 Fewer_than_Two_Copies.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  279 sep  8 11:14 File_Descriptor_of_stderr.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  234 sep  8 11:14 File_handler_in_C.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 1240 sep  8 11:14 Firefox_TCP_or_UDP.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  504 sep  8 11:14 Flush_Libc_Buffer.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  616 sep  8 11:14 IO_Errors.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  865 sep  8 11:14 Limitation_of_Anonymous_Pipes.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  648 sep  8 11:14 mmap_vs_read_and_write_Benchmark.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  607 sep  8 11:14 open_equivalent_of_fopen_w.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  566 sep  8 11:14 O_TRUNC_Flag_Behaviour.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 1967 sep  8 11:14 Pipe_Ends.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  596 sep  8 11:14 printf_Under_Strace.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  755 sep  8 11:14 Prints_Working_after_Closing_stdio.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 2219 sep  8 11:14 Receiver_Socked_File_Descriptor.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  783 sep  8 11:14 senderpy_and_receiverpy_Client-Server_Parallel.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 2591 sep  8 11:14 Syscalls_Used_by_cp.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  214 sep  8 11:14 Syscall_Used_by_fopen.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user  411 sep  8 11:14 write_filetxt_Permissions.md

You can see that the questions are saved in a file with the question name as the filename.

Question Format

The Moodle XML format is described in detail on the Moodle docs website. The Markdown format is described in the methodology repository.

If you want to use the Markdown questions with Moodle (i.e. convert them to Moodle XML), few more rules need to be followed, or else the Moodle import will fail:

• The ## Question Text header must be present and must not be empty.
• The ## Question Answers header must be present and must contain at least one correct answer.

All the other fields are optional.