Tracking and Weighting

Tracking refers to the recording of data on individual learner performance on interactive tasks. Xerte will track;

• the length of time the learner spends in the Xerte project
• the length of time the learners spends on an individual page
• the total score on all assessable interactive tasks in the Xerte project, according to weighting set by the author
• the score on individual pages
• whether or not a learner has attempted a task.

Xerte will only track answers and/or score on projects which include one or more of the following Interactivity pages;

• Answer X of Y
• Categories
• Dictation
• Drag and Drop Label
• Gap Fill
• Hotspot Question
• Interactive Text
• Interactive Video
• Matching Texts
• Media Lesson
• Model Answer (answer only)
• Modify Answer
• Multiple Choice Question
• Opinion
• Quiz
• Sortable Grid
• Text Highlight
• Text Correction
• Timeline/Matching Pairs

These are the only pages which can produce automated scoring.

To produce scores and data on time spent in a project or on specific pages, Xerte interacts with one or other of two technologies; SCORM or xAPI.

SCORM allows you to embed your LO in a learning platform such as Moodle or Blackboard. It will then feed information on individual usage and performance into the Gradebook Grade Centre, so that it can be made available to teaching staff and/or learners. To work with SCORM, you have to export your Xerte Package as a SCORM package (see Export on the Project Properties page). It is recommended that you export as a SCORM 2004 3rd Ed package. This downloads the package to your device, for you to then upload into the learning platform.

xAPI allows for the tracking of individual performance with the data being reported to a dashboard that is generated within the Xerte interface. This reporting feature is only available if you, or your IT team, have set up a Learning Record Store (LRS) and connected it to your Xerte installation. To track individual results that are related to a specific person, the project needs to be added to an LMS using LTI. When the project is started from the LMS, the LTI launch contains the details about the current user that Xerte uses to identify the learner (see LTI/xAPI on the Project Properties page). The project can also be tracked anonymously by placing the xapi_launch.php URL in the LMS. See xAPI in Project details (the middle panel of the Workspace)

The default in Xerte is for each scorable page to be given the same weight. If you don't change the defaults, that might mean, for example, that a Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) on one page has equal weight to 10 MCQs on a Quiz page. If you change the Tracking Score Weight for scorable pages, you can adjust the relative values of tasks or questions. In the example above, if you wanted all 11 MCQs to have equal value, you would set the MCQ page at 0.1 and the Quiz page at 1.0.

To do this, you will need to add Tracking Score Weight (0=Off) from the Optional Properties for each scorable page in your project and make the changes here.

If you don't want a page to be scored, set the Tracking Score Weight at 0.

Often it is as important to track completion as it is to track the score. By default all pages have to be visited or answered before a project is marked as complete. That is not always the case. Using the optional property 'Completion Not Required' (see Optional Property: Completion not required) to indicate that a certain page does not need to be visited. For example, it would make sense to do this for all standalone pages. Sometimes you want text pages to be visited for a certain amount of time. Although we do not recommend using that unless you make it very clear to your learners that they really need to look at each page for a certain amount of time. You can enable that feature by changing the value of 'Page timeout for completion' in the optional property 'Tracking…' of the project.