ASSESSING STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENTS EFFICIENTLY BY MEANS OF E-LEARNING TOOL

In our third year Web Application Development course, there are two assignments, which require students to implement a database driven web application by using ASP.NET and PHP respectively, aiming to assess the students’ achievements on their learning in ASP.NET and PHP.

The marking of these two assignments are very time consuming, mainly due to the functionality checking and the technique requirements checking. The examples of functionalities include registration, sending email and modifying information. The examples of technique requirements include “error handling”, “session management” and “log file”. For a particular functionality, if it is completed, then it is quick to mark. However, it is time consuming to determine if a functionality is not attempted or it is attempted, but it is not achieved. Obviously different marks should be awarded in these two situations. Sometimes we might need to exhaust all the code to make a conclusion. It is even more time consuming in the case of technique requirements.

This paper proposes an approach to make the functionality checking and the technique requirements checking more efficiently. We design a post submission self-evaluation by using Moodle Workshop Assessment form, in which each functionality or technique requirement is associated with three options: “not attempted”, “attempted but not achieved” and “achieved”. In the case of “attempted but not achieved”, students will provide the file names where they attempted. The post submission self-evaluation will be released right after the submission of the assignments. In this way, we eliminate some of the partial failures from the achievement without actually checking the code. It should be much more efficient. The experiments on Moodle have been done and the detail will be reported and discussed in the paper. An implementation plan will be given.