ascilite 2007 Workshop

Preparing interactive e-assessments: Practical examples from a range of disciplines including the physical sciences, health sciences, humanities and business

Objectives	This workshop will provide opportunities for participants to incorporate interactivity into e-assessment tasks. The tools that will be used for the interactivity will be based predominantly on Java applets and browser plugins; these tools will be separate from the e-assessment software so that they can be used in any learning management system. This is the basis of the design principle behind the interactive e-assessment framework, to separate the tool used for interactivity from the actual assessment engine. Workshop participants will use an established Moodle website to prepare e-assessment tasks using the standard question types available in a typical learning management system and incorporate Java applets and browser plugin files that enable students to manipulate data or items to generate their responses. These responses will be entered into question answer fields or used to choose from selected response options.
Intended audience	This workshop is intended for classroom practitioners involved in designing assessment tasks and academic developers involved in assisting teachers prepare assessment tasks or presenting courses on assessment design. The emphasis will be on the use of these tools for a range of disciplines including physical sciences, health sciences, humanities and business. The design principles for preparing interactive e-assessment tasks apply to all disciplines. It will be assumed that participants will have simple desktop navigation skills and will have used some type of learning management system (examples could include WebCT, Blackboard or Moodle). Participants do not require experience in using Moodle, this is just a convenient open source system to use for examples.
Facilitator	Professor Geoffrey Crisp, BSc (Hons), PhD, is Director, Centre for Learning and Professional Development, and Director, Online Education, The University of Adelaide. The Centre has responsibilities for a wide range of development programs involving academic and general staff as well as students. Geoff's current research activity includes online assessment, higher education policy and organisational and staff development. Website: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/clpd/about/clpdstaff/crispg.html Geoff is a HERDSA Fellow (2006) and Carrick Associate Fellow (2006-2007). His recent publications include the book The e-Assessment Handbook published in London by Continuum (Crisp, 2007).
Details of activities	e-Assessment tasks present new opportunities to engage students in an immersive and responsive educational environment; one that moves away from the static two-dimensional world of pen and paper (Ridgway and McCusker, 2003). Interactive e-assessment tasks have the potential to resemble the real world in which students will be required to operate. Teachers and academic developers can provide assessment tasks that are more adaptive in nature to the diversity in student populations (Boyle, 2005). e-Assessment tasks can take on some of the characteristics of games such as role-playing and real world scenarios; students can explore the consequences of their responses to particular problems. It is often difficult for teachers and academic developers to prepare assessment tasks that require student responses from the relational and extended abstract dimensions of the SOLO taxonomy in online assessments (Crisp, 2007). The difficulty frequently resides in the conflicting requirements in the online environment for automated marking and provision of appropriate feedback to students with the amount of time taken to prepare questions that assess the development of higher order capabilities and skills. For the learning environment there are quite a number of interactive and immersive tools that are designed to engage students in authentic learning, but few of these tools are used within e-assessments. There is considerable discussion surrounding the pedagogical advantages associated with immersive and authentic learning environments. Student would benefit from being able to undertake assessment tasks that test not only declarative knowledge but also conditional and procedural capabilities. This approach to creating assessment tasks encourages active student participation and the use of real world data or professional tools. The presence of tools that allow interactivity allows students to explore and test alternative solutions to a task. The Java applets and browser plugins used in this workshop are freely available on the web and they may be uses as stand alone tools for learning activities, as well as for e-assessment tasks. Workshop participants can preview some examples of the use of java applets and browser plugin files at http://andy.services.adelaide.edu.au/moodle (as illustrated in Figure 1 below). Participants may choose to add content to the Wikis available on the above Moodle website, or they may choose to add content to their own learning management system. Those participants with significant experience in e-assessment design can explore the examples on the Moodle website and prepare their own examples of interactive e-assessments to be used in their own courses. These participants may wish to bring examples of their own e-assessment tasks and explore how student responses at the relational and extended abstract level may be encouraged through the use of interactive tools. Those participants with little experience in e-assessment design can explore how to incorporate interactivity into an e-assessment, or begin by preparing simple e-assessment tasks and then progress to adding interactivity through redesigning the task using the Java applets and browser plugin files.
References	Boyle, A. (2005). Sophisticated tasks in e-Assessment: What are they? And what are their benefits? Proceedings 9th CAA Conference. [verified 8 Sep 2007] http://www.caaconference.com/pastConferences/2005/proceedings/BoyleA2.pdf Crisp, G. T. (2007). The e-Assessment Handbook. (pp111-115). London: Continuum. http://www.continuumbooks.com/Books/detail.aspx?ReturnURL=/main.aspx&CountryID=2&ImprintID=2&BookID=130610 Ridgway, J. & McCusker, S. (2003) Using computers to assess new educational goals. Assessment in Education, 10, 309-328.
Figure 1: Example of interactive e-assessments from http://andy.services.adelaide.edu.au/moodle