Adding metadata

Metadata—including details about creators, rights, and descriptions—is essential for ensuring accountability, legal compliance, and clarity in the management and use of assessment items and tests. This information helps track content origin and ownership, while also providing clear descriptions that facilitate better organization and retrieval of assessment resources.

We utilize ONYX’s metadata implementation, which largely supports the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard. As a result, metadata is stored in XML format within the IMS manifest of the test data. However, it is important to note that this metadata may not be displayed by other learning management systems, and even OPAL may overwrite it. The primary purpose is to maintain metadata within the original xml files being shared.

Here is an example of metadata with two contributors in the yaml section:

---
title: Demonstration of metadata
type: essay
knit: rqti::render_qtijs
identifier: demo_metadata

metadata:
  contributor:
    - name: Andrey Shevandrin
      role: author
    - name: Johannes Titz 
      role: author
  description: Demonstration of metadata
  rights: CC BY SA Andrey Shevandrin and Johannes Titz (2024).
---

# question

Essay exercise with metadata attributes in the yaml section.

Currently, the metadata may contain the following information:

description: A string providing a description of the task content.
rights: A string outlining the usage rights and terms associated with the task.
version: A string indicating the version of the task.
contributor: A list of contributor details, where each contributor entry may include the following information:
- name: A string representing the contributor’s name.
- role: A string specifying the type of contribution. Possible values include: author, publisher, unknown, initiator, terminator, validator, editor, graphical designer, technical implementer, content provider, technical validator, educational validator, script writer, instructional designer, and subject matter expert. By default, rqti sets this value to “author”.
- contribution_date: A string representing the date of contribution. By default, rqti sets this to the current system date.

If you are working on a set of tasks, setting metadata for each one individually can be tedious. To streamline this process, you can use the environment variables RQTI_AUTHOR and RQTI_RIGHTS, which will automatically populate these fields with default values.

For example, you can create an .Rprofile file and set the default author and usage rights as follows:

Sys.setenv(RQTI_AUTHOR = "Ada Lovelace")
Sys.setenv(RQTI_RIGHTS = "CC BY SA")

If you need to use non-default values, just specify the yaml attributes, which will override the environment variables.

2024-10-11