As you start to use Learnosity, there are a few core concepts that are worth explaining on their own. These concepts tend to run throughout the Learnosity tools, and are core to how to create, manage, deliver and report against content and student assessments.
Product Concepts
Learnosity provides the building blocks required to assemble and deliver rich, online assessments at scale. These are used within the core areas of EdTech products: authoring content, delivering assessments and analyzing results. There are three core areas of any learning product that you would choose to integrate the Learnosity tools into (more about best practices here can be found in our Technical Use Cases section). The parts of your product that you would generally integrate Learnosity into are as follows.
Authoring
The authoring part of your product may be your own Content Management System (CMS) or the Learnosity Author Site. It's the core location where internal subject matter experts, or in some products, teachers craft educational content (Questions, Features, Items, Activities - more on those later) using Learnosity authoring tools. Content is stored in a Learnosity Item bank, ready to deliver assessments.
Assessment
Within student facing educational websites, Learnosity tools help deliver a diverse range of rich assessments. The tools are intuitive, customizable, scalable, available on multiple platforms, and accessible to the broad spectrum of users with disabilities. Student responses and scores are captured back to Learnosity, ready for your analytics and reporting needs.
Analytics
The assessment results can then be presented for analysis through Learnosity reporting tools. Students can be shown how they performed in tests; teachers can be shown how a class performed; authors can infer how effective their Questions were at measuring the capabilities of a user base.
Item Bank Concepts
Within Learnosity, you will keep your content in discrete data stores, called "Item banks". Internally, Item banks will have structured content inside them, as explained below.
Now let's learn about the hierarchy of Learnosity content components. In this hierarchy, Questions and Features can be contained within Items, which which in turn can be contained in a higher grouping of an Activity. We will look at how the elements of this hierarchy are used to build content during the Authoring phase, for later delivery.
Questions
At the center of Learnosity functionality are Questions that allow you to deliver any one of 60+ Question types to your end-user. Authors use Learnosity visual authoring tools to create Questions. Questions can be manually or automatically scored.
Features
Questions are complemented by Learnosity Features, which include shared passages, video, audio, and interactive math tools.
Items
Questions and Features are grouped and laid out in containers we call Items. An Item might be used to:
- Combine related or multi-part Questions;
- Combine a video Feature with an associated Question; or
- Add in rulers, protractors and calculators with associated mathematical Questions.
Activities
Multiple Items are combined to create an Activity, which you can think of as the assessment, quiz or a test that an author creates.
Assessment Delivery & Reporting Concepts
At the assessment delivery time, we use three core concepts to track student responses and scores: session IDs, user IDs, and Activity IDs. These make it easy to easily report within your assessment and reporting platforms.
Sessions
We track delivered assessments as sessions. These sessions represent a single student taking a specific Activity, at a particular time. The student’s submission of the completed Activity can then be analyzed using Learnosity’s reporting tools.
User IDs
A unique user identifier or user ID (generally a UUID) is used to identify a single user across multiple testing sessions.
- Must not contain any personally identifiable information (PII);
- Must be an anonymized string representing a unique user (we recommend using a UUID); and
- Must not exceed 50 characters.
Note: this can be generated purely for Learnosity purposes (so as to avoid passing of any PII, Personally Identifiable Information), and doesn't need to be configured on the Learnosity side prior to taking an assessment.
Activity IDs
Not to be confused with an Item bank Activity, an Activity ID is a reporting concept that allows you to group similar sessions for reporting purposes. Used for displaying or fetching student sessions based on some breakdown defined by your platform - whether that's by a specific test, the assignment or test event for that test, or some other platform defined breakdown.
API Access Concepts
API Consumer
API Consumers provide Learnosity customers with a means to "consume" our APIs. A single API Consumer for a Learnosity customer will contain the following:
- One or more key and secret pairs, for customers to use to programatically authenticate Learnosity APIs;
- Read or read/write access configuration settings for your own customer, or partner Item banks;
- A data storage silo of student assessment response data.
One Learnosity customer account may have multiple API Consumers, depending on your license plan and/or use case.
Next Steps
- See the Learnosity Overview for a discussion of the Learnosity APIs and their roles.
- Browse the Technical Use Cases Overview for common deployment patterns.
- See the Learnosity Glossary for definitions of special Learnosity terms.