Facilitating complex assessment using Moodle

ABSTRACT

Assessment is a key element in any course, and providing students with a balance between formative and summative assessments is crucial. Defining such a process is a complex task for teachers and often entails a great workload. This makes it necessary to have tools to help in the assessment process definition and its monitoring. This paper first analyses the possibility of using the available tools in Moodle. For that, we carried out a bibliographical study, conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 teachers, and analysed the use of the Moodle gradebook in their courses. We found that teachers find it quite difficult to use the Moodle gradebook, so they rarely take advantage of all its possibilities. Taking this into account, we present Forge, a system that facilitates the definition of assessment processes following the e²Forja methodology in such a way that the produced process can be exported to Moodle. We have analysed whether Forge makes the assessment definition process easier or not. We have selected four courses to carry out a case study using Forge and interviewed the teachers again. We detected that Forge facilitates the assessment process definition and its monitoring, taking advantage of the characteristics of the Moodle gradebook.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning management systems
• student assessment
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/learning-tools-interoperability.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Basque Government [grant number IT980-16].

Notes on contributors

Ainhoa Alvarez

Ainhoa Alvarez received a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU in 2010. Since 2001, she has been a faculty member in the Department of Computer Languages and Systems at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU. She develops her research activities within the GaLan research group (http://galan.ehu.eus). She is the author of more than 50 publications in the area of computer-aided education. Her research interests include computer-aided education, learning analytics and intelligent tutoring systems.

Mikel Villamañe

Mikel Villamañe obtained a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU in 2017. Since 2003, he has been an assistant professor at the Engineering School of Bilbao, in the Computer Languages and Systems’ Department in the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU. He develops his research activities within the GaLan research group (http://galan.ehu.eus). His research interests include computer-aided education, learning analytics and mobile technologies.