Modeling Units of Assessment for Sharing Assessment Process Information: towards an Assessment Process Specification

IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) is an open technical e-learning standard supporting the interoperability and reusability of assessment items/tests. However, it is silent on who will be involved in the assessment and what are their roles, on how an assessment will be conducted and how it will be aligned with learning and teaching activities, etc. Moreover, it has insufficient expressiveness to specify the new forms of assessment (e.g., peer assessment and portfolio assessment) that are required in competence-based learning. In order to capture current educational practices in online assessment from the perspectives of assessment process management, we extend QTI and IMS Learning Design (LD) with an additional layer that describes assessment processes in an interoperable, abstract, and efficient way. The aim is an assessment process specification that can be used to model both classic and innovative forms of assessment, and to align assessment with learning and teaching activities. In this paper, the development of the assessment process specification and its benefits and requirements are described. A conceptual model, the core of the assessment process specification is presented. The proposed conceptual model has been subject to a first validation, which is also described.