Develop: Tips and Checklists
1. Develop Tips - Portability and Manageability
The main reasons for retaining an offline stage in your e-assessment workflow are the benefits of Portability and Manageability that it brings.
If you author your e-assessment directly in your college systems, you may lose it if the system is upgraded or is ‘purged’ by your technical support.
You may lose you e-assessments if the college system suffers a crash (it does happen).
You may lose your e-Assessment materials if you leave your job. Exporting your e-assessment materials from a VLE can be quite difficult due to the technical formats that are used – some are closed and proprietary –designed to lock you into a particular system.
Setting up your e-assessment in your college system can be tricky enough without having the worry of editing it there as well.
The work involved to create objective / MCQstyle tests and questions is considerable and you are advised to do that first in a word processing programme you are comfortable with – it is also much quicker than authoring using VLE system tools.
If you are creating visual questions you will need to create the graphic elements externally anyway, using graphics programmes of your choice (the simple ones that come free with PCs / Macs are probably quite adequate for most purposes). For this you should develop a simple and clear naming convention for your image and word processing files as well as using folders with clear names to organise them – essential if you are collaborating.
We strongly advise that you first create your essay and report questions etc. and rubrics and marking scales etc. in a word processing programme.
For objective MCQ / style tests use a word processing programme to do your design and development work (some lecturers may prefer a spread sheet is they have the skills). If you are working as part of a team, then using a word processing file format like Word will make collaboration much easier than working in the VLE itself.
In your offline workflow try and create a simple reference / coding system that links a question to an SQA unit (use the unit code) and a particular learning outcome (use number) and knowledge / skills (bullet number and evidence (bullet number). This seems quite onerous – so, for individuals the SQA code may be enough but for collaborative work teams the full reference path would be ideal (and possible necessary). If you visualise a scenario where you have to manage hundreds of questions, then these issues become very important