PELE – A SOFTWARE SYSTEM TO ASSIST INNOVATIVE TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT

In the latest years the level of penetration for smart-phones started to accelerate. Instead of banning these powerful technologies from the classroom we chose to harness them and use them to increase the interactivity of the courses.
This paper presents the PeLe system (Peer Learning Assessment Services) (PeLe) that allows on one hand the students to use their own smart-phones, tablets or portable computers to provide the responses for assessments and post assessment activities and on the other hand allows the teacher to monitor the activity and give verification or elaborative feedback to individual students/groups of students immediately after a test or activity.
This is a key factor helping students to improve their skills by the use of active collaborative supported learning. Students will, when they still remember the questions in the test, learn why the correct answer is correct and why the other ones are incorrect. Thus, mobile technology provides new evaluation and testing criteria within education and training.
The system has been developed using an iterative prototyping process. In the design process have been involved the main system stakeholders: teachers and students. The very context of use dictates that a special emphasis must be placed on the human computer interaction aspects. The educational activity must be supported in a transparent and usable way. The system has been evaluated through a number of usability tests that included both expert based evaluation and user testing.
With PeLe teachers and educational organizations may start using a new evaluation model where the (formative) assessment results from several tests and/or the final exam (summative assessment) in a class are turned into an active, creative and collaborative peer learning process.