MASSIVE APPLICATION OF ONLINE ASSESSMENTS

The Universidad Autonoma de Baja California (UABC) looked to improve collegiate evaluation (departmental) to support the academic staff development and strengthening the institutional processes and mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation as part of Institutional Development Plan (IDP) 2003-2006, and that was followed in the IDP 2007-2010.

The collegiate evaluation (departmental) is design in a collaborative way meant to cover all content in common learning areas, in approved programs, with the unique propose of improve learning process in the students through unification of criteria in evaluation. Normally, this test is made on paper to a large number of students in a specific period of time (normally to the end of the semester).

The Centro de Eduacion Abierta (CEA) works to pursuit the objective of “provide institutional services of online course administration, give support, training and offering additional services of information and communication technologies (ICT) need in educational programs at UABC”, with that as a goal, on December 2005 acquired Question Mark Perception (QMP) software license, to apply assessment and evaluation in academic and Institutional projects.

In 2009, the CEA and the Engineering department implement the first pilot project to apply departmental evaluation using QMP within the Academic Unit (AU). The first evaluation was applied to near of 800 students during five days using several computer labs in the same AU. The project focus was to improve the application process, as well as to reduce the investment of time in getting the results out and reduce human error probabilities in the capture of data.

With that earned experience in the pilot project the CEA implemented new similar projects with other AU with different conditions of technology and disperses geographically. Nowadays, seven new AU were incorporated belonging to the Economical-administrative area distributed in different cities of the state, as well as the department of Chemical Sciences and Engineering in Tijuana.

For 2011 the estimation is that these AU are going to make 12 different tests each one to evaluate a particular subject of the program, and the population will be close to 6000 students.

In the following presentation it will be describe the lessons learned and how to develop a strategy to implement massive application of assessments via Internet at an institutional level. UABC has 44 AU, attending 46000 students in three main campuses, and six peripheral units located in major cities in the state.