exams2arsnova: Generation of Exam/Quiz Sessions in ARSnova Format

Description

Interface for generating interactive sessions in the JSON format of the audience response system ARSnova (not actively developed anymore).

Usage

exams2arsnova(file, n = 1L, dir = ".",
  name = "R/exams", sname = NULL, qname = NULL,
  quiet = TRUE, resolution = 100, width = 4, height = 4, svg = FALSE,
  encoding = "UTF-8", envir = NULL, engine = NULL,
  url = "https://arsnova.eu/api", sessionkey = NULL, jsessionid = NULL,
  active = TRUE, votingdisabled = FALSE, showstatistic = FALSE, showanswer = FALSE,
  abstention = TRUE, variant = "lecture", ssl.verifypeer = TRUE,
  fix_choice = TRUE, ...)
make_exams_write_arsnova(url = "https://arsnova.eu/api", sessionkey = NULL,
  jsessionid = NULL, name = "R/exams", sname = NULL, qname = NULL,
  active = TRUE, votingdisabled = FALSE, showstatistic = FALSE, showanswer = FALSE,
  abstention = TRUE, variant = "lecture", ssl.verifypeer = TRUE, fix_choice = TRUE)

Value

A list of exams as generated by xexams is returned invisibly.

Arguments

file: character. A specification of a (list of) exercise files.
n: integer. The number of copies to be compiled from file.
dir: character. The default is either display on the screen or the current working directory.
name: character. A name prefix for resulting exercises and RDS file.
sname: character. A vector of length 2 with the session name (maximum of 50 characters) and its abbreviation (maximum of 8 characters). Ignored if the sessionkey of an existing session is supplied and otherwise copied by default from name.
qname: character. A vector of names for each question/exercise in file. By default, the name is used.
quiet: logical. Should output be suppressed when calling xweave and texi2dvi.
resolution, width, height: numeric, passed to xweave.
svg: logical. Should graphics be rendered in SVG or PNG (default)?
encoding: character, ignored. The encoding is always assumed to be UTF-8.
envir: argument passed to xweave (which passes it to knit).
engine: argument passed to xweave indicating whether "Sweave" (default) or "knitr" should be used for rendering Rnw exercises.
url,sessionkey,jsessionid: character specifying (1) the base URL of the ARSnova API, (2) the 8-digit ARSnova session key, (3) the JSESSIONID cookie of an active ARSnova session. If all are provided all questions are imported directly into the existing ARSnova session. Otherwise, a JSON import file is generated.
active: logical. Should the question be active (i.e., released for students) or locked?
votingdisabled: logical. Should voting be disabled?
showstatistic: logical. Should statistics be shown?
showanswer: logical. Should answers be shown?
abstention: logical. Are abstentions allowed?
variant: character. Should the question be a "lecture" or a "preparation" questions?
ssl.verifypeer: logical. Should SSL certificates be validated when connecting via https?
fix_choice: logical. Should math markup be removed in single and multiple choice lists? (This may be needed for older ARSnova versions where math markup is rendered in the question itself but not the choice list.)
...: arguments passed on to xexams.

Details

exams2arsnova generates exams in the JSON format for ARSnova using xexams. It proceeds by (1) calling xweave on each exercise, (2) reading the resulting Markdown or LaTeX text, (3) transforming the text to Markdown, and (4) embedding the Markdown text into the JSON format for ARSnova (and optionally imports it into a running ARSnova session).

Since 2020 the development of ARSnova has been shifted to a new tool called Particify and hence the arsnova.eu server is not hosted anymore. For an export function to Particify see exams2particify.

For steps (1) and (2) the standard drivers in xexams are used. For step (3) a suitable transformation function is set up on the fly using make_exercise_transform_pandoc. For step (4) a simple writer function is set up on the fly that embeds the transformed Markdown code into a hard-coded JSON template using toJSON and either writes a single JSON file for each exam or imports these directly into an ARSnova session.

When url, sessionkey, and jsessionid are all supplied, curlPerform is used to import tall questions directly into the existing ARSnova session. Otherwise, a file is written to the disk and then needs to be imported manually into an ARSnova server. This file is either a JSON file for a whole new session (if sessionkey is NULL, the default) or a CSV file with the questions only.

Examples

Run this code

## load package and enforce par(ask = FALSE)
library("exams")
options(device.ask.default = FALSE)

if (FALSE) {
## exams2arsnova can either create text files with JSON data
exams2arsnova("tstat2")

## or directly post this to an active ARSnova session (for which the
## server URL, the 8-digit session key, and the JSESSIONID cookie are needed)
exams2arsnova("tstat2", url = "https://arsnova.eu/api",
  sessionkey = "49061284", jsessionid = "A5BEFDA4141816BB425F2204A602E4B3")
}