Open assessment infrastructure

Assessment infrastructure covers how institutions create, deliver, score, and move digital assessments. This guide explains what each system does and where Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) fits.

The assessment lifecycle

No standard or product covers every step. Institutions need clear system boundaries and records that help staff troubleshoot failures.

Author

Create semantic items, response declarations, scoring rules, metadata, and accessible content.
Validate

Check XML, schema, semantics, supported profiles, accessibility, and package safety.
Manage

Version item banks, permissions, assets, review state, and provenance.
Deliver

Apply attempt policy, candidate preferences, navigation, identity, and secure item delivery.
Score

Evaluate trusted responses against authoritative item rules and preserve attempt state.
Report

Return outcomes to instructors, gradebooks, analytics, and institutional records.
Move

Export content, assets, metadata, and test records without depending on one platform.

Assessment work moves from authoring through validation, item-bank management, delivery, scoring, reporting, and transfer. Reviews may send an item back to authoring at any stage.

Where QTI stops

QTI describes assessment content and behavior. An institution still needs explicit contracts for launch, identity, roster, accommodations, security, attempts, results, and operations.

Assessment infrastructure boundaries
Boundary	Institutional responsibility
LMS and launch	Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) or another launch method passes context and roles. QTI carries assessment content and behavior; it does not replace the LMS shell.
Identity and roster	Identity providers and OneRoster or student information system (SIS) integrations establish people, courses, classes, and enrollments. Candidate records do not belong in portable item content.
Grade return	The host assessment service decides which trusted outcomes return to the gradebook and how retries, overrides, and scaling work.
Accessibility	Authors create accessible content. Delivery systems apply preferences and provide keyboard, focus, names, states, messages, contrast, and time behavior.
Security	Hosts own authorization, attempt policy, authoritative scoring, archive safety, asset access, audit records, and incident response.

Guides and research

Choose the guide that matches your current work. Each one cites official sources, public code, known limits, and a checklist.

QTI 3 authoring guide
Create QTI items that validate and export cleanly.
QTI 3 migration guide
Plan and test a move from older assessment formats to QTI 3.
QTI validation guide
Understand what XML, schema, behavior, and interoperability tests prove.
Accessible assessment procurement
Write accessibility requirements that suppliers can demonstrate and institutions can test.
QTI 2 versus QTI 3
Choose a QTI version based on the systems and content your institution uses.
QTI 3 implementation matrix
See which qti3 capabilities have public code or tests and which remain unverified.

Compare hosting responsibilities

Hosting location does not determine openness. Evaluate who can inspect the code, export the content, operate the service, apply security updates, restore data, and move to another provider.

Hosted: review tenancy, regions, subprocessors, backups, incident response, update policy, data return, and exit support.
On-premises: review staffing, release cadence, secrets, observability, capacity, disaster recovery, and the support boundary.
Either model: require portable content, reproducible configuration, documented dependencies, and tested recovery.

Institutional evaluation

Test the product with representative content and your institution’s integrated workflows. Record four kinds of evidence separately:

Standard: What the published specification requires.
Implementation: What public or reviewable code provides.
Interoperability: What happened across named independent systems and fixtures.
Certification: What an official program lists for a named product, version, and role.

Primary sources and public code

Where QFlow fits

QFlow is Longsight’s QTI authoring product. Its workflow and the public qti3 packages show how Longsight implemented parts of these guides. Refer to the official specifications for requirements, and test interoperability and certification separately.

Review QFlow product information Inspect the evidence matrix

Field notes from implementation work

These dated articles describe the engineering work behind the guides.