WEB APPLICATION FOR COMPARISON OF LEARNING OF STUDENTS FROM DIFFERENT UNIVERSITIES

The ERAMIS project (European-Russian-Central Asian Network of Master Degrees "Informatics as a Second Competence") is an international project funded by the European Tempus programme. The main objective of this project is to create a network of master degrees in computer science as a second competence intended for specialists in social sciences, exact sciences, and engineering. The objective of this master degree is to give specialists coming from other disciplines, a training enabling them to master computer techniques and programming languages in order to create, develop, manage and maintain new software tools for their specific domains.

One of the secondary objectives of the project is to develop an own culture of quality assurance between the different partners of the project. The assessment of students is one of the most important elements of the quality assurance method of the project.

Student assessment procedures are designed to measure the achievement of the intended learning outcomes. The assessment procedure also provides valuable information for universities about the effectiveness of teaching and learners’ support. Moreover, the assessment procedure allows the partners to compare the results between subjects, programmes, and universities, and leads to an exchange of experiences of best practices. The main goal of the assessment procedure is to compare educational results between the universities of the project.

Unfortunately, due to the international and heterogeneous nature of this project (14 universities from 8 countries), developing and applying comparable criteria and methodologies are difficult tasks.

In the frame of this project, a web application has been developed to help the partners to assess and compare learning outcomes. This web application provides an online testing system. The results and knowledge obtained from the testing system will allow to improve the educational process, to change the syllabuses of the master programs, to change the teachers or provide additional training to some teachers, to find the educational gap between the universities and propose areas to be improved, and to check the level of knowledge of students from one university before moving to another university.