Assessment drives learning. It provides motivation and guidance. It defines standards and is the mechanism by which achievement is monitored and recognised. In order to achieve excellence in open learning, we must develop and test assessment methods and understand how excellence can be achieved consistently.
eAssessment has the potential to assist the university in tackling several strategic issues.
The OU's Centre for Excellence in the Open Learning of Mathematics, Science, Computing and Technology made several claims for the opportunites offered by eAssessments. The Centre also tempered those claims with several challenges.
eAssessments:
eAssessments:
The Centre concluded that eAssessment for learning will be a crucial learning technology for the 21st century, particularly for those universities that aspire to a global role. Because of its exceptional pedagogical and learning systems skill base, and its position within the Open Educational Resources movement, the Open University has the opportunity to claim a central role in the further development and deployment of eAssessment for learning.
The importance of feedback for learning has been highlighted by a number of authors, emphasising its role in fostering meaningful interaction between student and instructional materials (Buchanan, 2000), its contribution to student development and retention (Yorke, 2001), but also its time-consuming nature for many academic staff (Gibbs, 2006). In distance education, where students work remotely from both peers and tutors, the practicalities of providing rapid, detailed and regular feedback on performance are vital issues.
Gibbs and Simpson suggest eleven conditions in which assessment supports student learning (Gibbs and Simpson 2004).
Four of these conditions, those in italics, are particularly apposite with regard to the use of eAssessment with distance education. They are reflected in the design of OpenMark and are amplified in the rationale behind the development of the S151, Maths for Science, online assessments (Ross, Jordan and Butcher, 2006) where
Here is some raw evidence for the effect of instant feedback. The charts were prepared for questions used in a summative iCMA and we are clear that the summative nature of the test made students pay attention to and act on the feedback.
The charts show scores on an S104 question and iCMA taken by ~1,000 students.
Figure 1.1 shows that approximately 57% of students answered the question correctly at the first try and were awarded 3 marks. After a first hint a further ~16% gave the correct answer and were awarded two marks. And after a second more detailed hint a further 9% of students reached the correct answer and were awarded 1 mark. 18% failed to get the correct answer and scored zero.
Figure 1.2 combines all question scores across a summative iCMA to show the effect of feedback and multiple tries. If we add up the scores on the first try we arrive at the left hand chart; the sort of chart an examiner might well like to see with almost a normal distribution.
The middle chart shows the effect of adding in the scores of students who gave the correct answer on the second try and the overall effect is clearly to move the peak of the distribution to the right, to a higher score.
The right hand chart completes the story and provides clear evidence that students are acting upon the instant feedback that these iCMAs provide and are learning in the process.
In Hands-on Moodle Quiz you will learn:
You will end the course with your own set of ready to use questions.
N.b. The hardest task on this course is learning to use the features of Moodle to enable you to write good questions. Consequently we provide substantial time and opportunity for you to work on your own questions. But the course cannot and will not try to provide any measure of how good your questions are. To answer that you will need to put your questions in front of your own students and monitor what happens. We will show you how to use the Quiz reporting tools and suggest what you should be aiming for but it will be up to you to measure whether or not you hit those targets. Learning from your own successes and mistakes takes time too. In the long run eAssessment can improve student learning and can save you time but as with many other things you will only maximise the rewards, to your students and to yourself, by putting in sufficient effort.