Abstract:

The European education policies focus on higher education and lifelong learning to support the knowledge society. Europe 2020 recognises the importance of the e-learning in the higher education: it is a guarantee of access to training, supported by the modern technologies to encourage training processes.

Starting from 2012, the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are established within the e-learning as on-line courses prepared by universities for a large number of students allowing distance learning with free access. Open and Distance Learning (ODL) and Open Educational Resource (OER) are the basis of the MOOC philosophy and combine the methodologies for distance learning with open educational materials and content, to be included in pre-structured and modifiable courses from third persons. The massive training courses present educational contents freely usable in on-line environments, using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

The aim of the contribution is to focus attention on the online assessment, a typical problem of these kind of open courses, through the analysis of literature to reconstruct a theoretical reference framework. The evaluation, as a significant moment of the educational action, accompanies the online training course, allowing a continuous monitoring of the teachers and a reflection on the learning process for the learners. Describing the characteristics of Open and Distance learning highlights the peculiarity of on-going assessment in terms of interaction and relationship among teachers, tutors and learners when they share experiences and knowledge. Moreover, the online assessment allows students participating in their own training path, through exercises, laboratory activities and self-assessment procedures. An innovative feature is the collaborative peer evaluation that allows not only the contribution of the individual in the group to be detected, but also the incidence of this contribution in the learning of the individual, even by means of complex tasks that cannot be evaluated in an automated way. The work aims also at highlighting how the assessment actors, in online learning environments, are not only teachers and tutors (etero-evalutation), but the same learners (self-assessment) and all the participants (co-evalutation).

Keywords:

e-learning, MOOC, Distance learning, online assessment, evaluation tools.