Integrating Assessment into E-learning Courses

Assessment is an integral part of learning, requiring learners to demonstrate the knowledge or skills they have acquired throughout the course. In this chapter, we focus not only on summative assessments, which are given at the end of a course, but also on formative assessments, that is to say, the use of assessments throughout the course whereby students are informed how to improve their learning by being given constructive feedback. The feedback in formative assessments is meant to guide students’ learning. Also, their results can lead to a better understanding of personal educational needs. The design of assessments should concur with the design of instruction and learning. Thus, the Learning Design specification (LD 2003) enables developers to formalize learning and the Question and Test Interoperability specification (QTI 2003) enables the formalization of testing. The first part of this chapter will introduce assessment and its relation to learning design. Subsequently, the second part of the chapter presents the QTI specification and the structures and features it provides for describing assessments. Examples of how QTI and LD structures can be integrated will be shown and explained. Even though there is as yet no normative de-scription of this integration available, the examples will clarify how both specifications enhance each other and how they interact. Their possibilities and impossibilities will be illustrated, using the two specifications in their current form, QTI version 2.0 and LD 1.0. The last part considers a possible integration of LD and QTI with the four processes of assessment.