Striving for platform independence in the e-learning landscape: a study on a flexible exercise creation system

The contemporary e-learning landscape at universities consists of various tools, platforms and services. At the same time, an increasingly bigger proportion of learning happens online. When creating exams or exercises for students in such a setting, teachers often face the following issues: (1) having to create exercises for multiple platforms, (2) lack of support for creating complex exercises, and (3) having to transfer exercises between platforms. To solve these issues we created a platformin-dependent tool for creating e-learning exercises and exams. The system relies on the structured Markdown format, which is then parsed and exported to learning management systems (LMS) such as Moodle, or to PDF. Scripts can be used to fully customize and randomize the Markdown exercises for each student, which mitigates cheating through copying answers, and enables holding exams that students take asynchronously. Overall, we argue that as digital learning ecosystems are becoming increasingly complex, educational institutions and teachers should strive more strongly for platform independence. In this study, we demonstrate how this can be done with exams and exercises.