An Effective Multimedia Item Shell Design for Individualized Education

The advantages of creating multimedia item types and applying computer-based adaptive testing in education are: First, the capability to motivate learning by making the learners feel more engaged and interactive, as well as a better representation of concepts, which are not possible when using conventional multiple choice tests. Second, instead of following a curriculum designed for average students, an individual is given a customized curriculum suitable for his or her learning capability. However, the issue to address when achieving these goals is the enormous amount of item types required to transform the current multiple choice questions into multimedia formats, and the criteria used to determine the difficulty level of a multimedia question item. In this paper we propose a multimedia item shell design that not only reduces the number of item types required, but also computes difficulty level of an item automatically. The concept of question seed is also introduced to make content creation more cost-effective.