Extending and Developing Online Testing Environment for Summative & Formative Assessments

Abstract

Online education is one of the most popular education scenarios at present and the environment used for online education in this study is called the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or Learning Management System (LMS). Moodle is one of the most popular and widely used Learning Management Systems that comes under the free software license. Online assessments play a major role when evaluating student skills under the online education scenario. There are two types of assessments in evaluating learners’ performances in a course. These assessments are clarified as formative assessments and summative assessments respectively. A formative assessment is a self-reflective and bidirectional process between teacher and student to enhance the learning process and the learner is not given grades for formative assessments since these are done in an unsupervised environment. Summative assessment summarizes the development of learners at a particular time of a course and the student is given grades for their activities since they are done in a supervised and controlled environment. The current stable version (1.9.9+ as of July 2010) of Moodle comes with lack of capabilities to conduct summative assessments under controlled and supervised manner. As a solution, the project was proposed and it provides a comprehensive way of conducting assessments under a more controlled and well supervised environment. The project includes a new module development and modifications for quiz module. The newly introduced module called, “Assessment” follows core architectural and security behaviors of Moodle. The development was done by using PHP 5. Java script was used for the client side data manipulation. The Apache server was used as the web server whereas the data base server used was MySQL 5.1.3.The development took place in Windows platform and was tested for both windows and Linux platforms. The solution covers four main functionalities needs to perform summative assessments and improves the usability of formative assessments. The four main functionalities are, scheduling online assessments, processing student applications, conducting online assessment and releasing results. The completed solution was tested using a set of pre defined test cases where the system passed more than 95% of the test cases. There were a handful of goals and useful objectives achieved by the implemented solution and more than 80% of objectives were fulfilled. It reduces the pre examination stress of students through the “student centric” examination approach introduced and speeds up the whole e-Learning process. The final system implements an automated way of conducting summative and formative assessments in a secure and controlled environment.