Mario Amelung

E-Assessment as a Service

Assessment is an essential element in learning processes. It is therefore not unsurprising that almost all learning management systems (LMSs) offer support for assessment, e.g., for the creation, execution, and evaluation of multiple choice tests. We have designed and implemented generic support for assessment that is based on assignments that students submit as electronic documents. In addition to assignments that are graded by teachers, we also support assignments that can be automatically tested and evaluated, e.g., assignments in programming languages, or other formal notations. In this paper, we report about the design and implementation of a service-oriented approach for automatic assessment of programming assignments. The most relevant aspects of our “assessment as a service” solution are that on the one hand the advantages of automatic assessment can be used with a multitude of programming languages, as well as other formal notations (as so-called backends); on the other hand, the features of these types of assessment can be easily interfaced with different existing learning management systems (as so called frontends). We also report about the practical use of the implemented software components at our university and other educational institutions.

EduComponents: experiences in e-assessment in computer science education

To reduce the workload of teachers and to improve the effectiveness of face-to-face courses, it is desirable to supplement them with Web-based tools. This paper presents our approach for supporting computer science education with software components which support the creation, management, submission, and assessment of assignments and tests, including the automatic assessment of programming exercises. These components are integrated into a general-purpose content management system (CMS) and can combined with other components to create tailor-made learning environments. We describe the design and implementation of these components, and we report on our practical experience with deploying the software in our courses.

Towards generic and flexible web services for e-assessment

In computer science education, lectures are typically accompanied by exercise courses and/or lab practices are essential for the learning effect since they provide opportunities for students to apply their theoretical knowledge to practical problems. The automatic testing and assessment of assignments in a Web-based environment offers students more learning possibilities (e.g., time and location-independent) with immediate feedback and helps teachers to reduce their workload so they can concentrate on issues regarding content and didactics. In this paper we present a generic, flexible, and reusable Web-based system architecture and its implementation for automatic testing of programming assignments and assignments in other formal systems. We also describe our practical experience gathered with this approach in computer science courses at two different universities.

Experiences in Hybrid Learning with eduComponents

Since five years we practice hybrid learning in all our courses by combining classroom lectures and group exercises with Web-based e-learning. In this paper we reflect the experiences with our learning environment and discuss the changes in teaching and learning that resulted from the new approach as well as pedagogical concerns and policy issues.