Technologies for Interactive Learning and Assessment Content Development

摘要

Recent technology trends evolved the student assessment from traditional ones ("pen-and-paper" and "face-to-face") to modern e-Assessment system. These modern approaches allow the teachers to conduct and evaluate an exam with huge number of students in a short period of time. Even more important, both the teacher and the students achieve .the evaluation results immediately after the assessment has finished. Although the e-Assessment system speeds up the evaluation, teachers face a huge challenge to prepare, organize and generate a huge set of questions. The questions must cover all learning objectives and their number should be as large as possible to prevent cheating by guessing or memorization of correct answers from previous exams. This paper presents several technologies that can efficiently realize strategies to develop a huge question database with minimal teacher efforts. It also describes the methodologies and strategies based on a specific technology. The technologies are categorized in two classes of e-Assessment systems that are used at the authors' faculty: the traditional e-Assessment system with usual multiple-choice answers and the newest e-Assessment system with interactive images. The question generation is based on defining the questions and answers as XML files (for more advanced users) and MS Word-based files (for users with basic IT background). The question database can be used both for efficient and effective e-Assessment and e-Learning.