eAssessment: Trends in Content Reuse and Standardization

Victor Gonzalez-Barbone, Assisstant Professor, Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo, Uruguay, and Martin Llamas-Nistal, Professor, Universidad de Vigo, Spain

10/27/2008
(Original Publish Date: 3/7/2007)

eAssessment saves human work by automating presentation and marking, but also enables new forms of testing of interest for engineering education. Authoring reliable, high quality assessment content is a difficult and costly task. Public content repositories populated with stand-alone items of assessment content enable authors and teachers to set up an exam by selection and ordering, with little additional effort. Reusable, shareable assessment objects require conformance to standards of packaging and transportability. After revising eAssessment tools and content creation standards, this article identifies some popular learning platforms, authoring tools and public repositories, and verifies their standards compliance. Most popular learning platforms support packaging standards, but not assessment content transportability. Though some outstanding examples exist, there is a need for more public objects repositories and a deeper engagement in standards compliance. Government agencies and educational organizations have a role to play as the most powerful driving forces towards standards adoption for reusable content creation and sharing. Research in tools to aid education practitioners will be always valued, and can be carried on with rough consensus and small funding.