exams2ilias

exams2ilias is a small standalone R package that builds ILIAS question pool exports on top of exams while keeping the ILIAS-specific QTI rendering logic inside this package. The export structure is validated against ILIAS 9.20.

Install

Install the latest development version from GitHub:

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("mchlbckr/exams2ilias")

The CRAN release is the stable version, but may be behind GitHub:

install.packages("exams2ilias")

Minimal example

library(exams2ilias)

outdir <- tempfile("ilias-")
dir.create(outdir)

exams2ilias(
  "lm.Rmd",
  n = 1,
  dir = outdir,
  name = "lm_ilias"
)

Exercises bundled with exams can be addressed by file name, such as "lm.Rmd", "ttest.Rmd", or "boxplots.Rmd". Use system.file() only when you want to reference exercises bundled with exams2ilias itself.

Bundled exercises

The package bundles self-contained statistics exercises for the main question types supported by exams2ilias:

example_dir <- system.file("exercises", package = "exams2ilias")
list.files(example_dir, pattern = "\\.[Rr]md$", full.names = TRUE)

These include stats_cloze.Rmd, stats_schoice.Rmd, stats_mchoice.Rmd, stats_num.Rmd, and stats_string.Rmd.

To export the full set, source the bundled helper script:

source(file.path(example_dir, "generate_examples.R"))

outdir <- tempfile("ilias-examples-")
dir.create(outdir)

generate_example_exports(outdir)

This writes one _qpl.zip per example and an additional combined stats_examples_qpl.zip to outdir.

You can also export a single exercise directly:

library(exams2ilias)

outdir <- tempfile("ilias-")
dir.create(outdir)

exams2ilias(
  file.path(example_dir, "stats_cloze.Rmd"),
  n = 1,
  dir = outdir,
  name = "stats_cloze",
  xmlcollapse = FALSE,
  solutionswitch = FALSE
)

The cloze example uses exams::add_cloze() and format_metainfo() so it can serve as a template for new ILIAS-ready cloze exercises.

ILIAS authoring notes

ILIAS renders dropdown labels as plain text. Avoid HTML and math markup in choice-based cloze gaps; exams2ilias removes unsupported HTML tags from these labels and emits a warning.

For cloze questions, exams2ilias enables ILIAS Identical Scoring by default. This lets repeated correct answers in different gaps, such as repeated dropdown choices, receive points independently.

For visible tables in question text, use simple Markdown tables or knitr::kable(df, format = "html", row.names = FALSE). The default table_strategy = "html_basic" rewrites rendered tables to a conservative ILIAS-compatible subset. Avoid kableExtra, CSS classes, inline styles, captions, rowspan, colspan, nested tables, and layout HTML. For wide tables or cases where visual column separation is essential, test the export with table_strategy = "pre".

Static files should be registered as supplements, for example with exams::include_supplement("figure.png"). Files created during exercise processing, such as plots and CSV files written by the exercise, are handled as supplements automatically and embedded via Base64 where possible.