Abstract:

The characteristics of the society in which we live, where knowledge and the ways of its use are the most important in everyday life, brings new challenges for the higher education. The extensive use of technology in learning and working, is forcing its use in the assessment process. A lot of software packages exist in the market to realize automated assessment. Several of them are very comprehensive and cover a lot of aspects for testing student knowledge, but most of them are stand alone applications without possibilities for interoperability, adaptability acording to learner characteristics and possibilities for content reuse.
In this paper we describe the process of designing interoperable and secured e-testing framework by remodeling an existing eTesting system and introducing new structured service oriented architecture, based on encapsulating existing business functions as loosely coupled, reusable, platform-independent services which collectively realize required business objective. This architecture should support interoperable content and exchange of learner profiles, give possibility for search and retrieval of any data bank content in locals and remote repositories.
The existing system is web based stand alone monolithic system, designed in three tier architecture and applied at PMF Institute of Informatics and 3 other Universities in the country. The system is very comprehensive, covering many aspects in assessment of student knowledge, designed for cases where number of students is very big (several hundreds), and in the cases when the exams are allowed for students every month. The system evaluates a different test for each student each time he applies for, and has innovative procedures for exam strategy definition, grading and results reporting. The concepts and the architecture of the system is described in details in some of the perevious published papers[1].
The problems we have faced with during 4 years of using the system, especially after it was installed in other Universities were that its current architecture does not provide any interoperability between these systems, any possibilities for data and content exchange, and does not fit the requirements of a broad enough user base to ensure widespread uptake and continued development.
In order to achieve better interoperability of the redesigned system we have used several new standards and protocols for building new service oriented architecture based eTesting solution, like web services, XML, SOAP, UDDI, BPEL etc.

References:
[1] G.Armenski, M.Gusev, “eTesting Infrastructure”, FACTA UNIVERSITATIS (NIS), Series: Electronics and Energetics, Volume 18, Issue No. 2, 181-204p, August 2005. http://factaee.elfak.ni.ac.yu/fu2k52/contents.html

Keywords:

eassessment, elearning, etesting, soa, web service interoperability.