E-Learning Support for Assignment Management and Marking

This project is funded under the Encouraging and Supporting Innovation Fund of the Tertiary Education Commission under the official project title of ‘E-Learning Support for Formative Assessment Feedback: Improving Efficiency to Enable Increased Focus on Quality’.

The project timeframe is 1 February 2009 to 30 June2010.

Please see lightworkmarking.org for up-to-date project information.

Project team

Dr Eva Heinrich (project leader), Massey University

Geraldine Gulbransen (project coordinator), Massey University

A/Prof Mark Brown, Massey University

Derek White, University of Waikato

Sue Dark, The Open Polytechnic

Dr Mark Laws, Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi

Derek Chirnside, University of Canterbury

Project focus

The project focuses on assignment-type assessment. This implies assessment as part of course work with a strong formative focus. Assignments are work that students have constructed themselves and that need the attention of a human marker. This makes assignment-type assessment distinct from multiple choice-type assessment (for which the correct answers can be predefined and marking can be automated) and from exam-type assessment (which is of summative nature only).

We acknowledge the importance of the other assessment forms but will focus in this project on assignment-type assessment. We see high potential for impact on student learning and for improvement on what current e-learning systems offer in this area.

As part of this project we will develop an open source application that will work closely with Moodle. We want to make full use of existing Moodle functionality but will extend this to provide strong support for assignment management and marking tasks.

Our main project objectives are:

• To develop an open source e-learning assignment management and marking application that is based on educational assessment principles and is fully integrated with the Moodle open source learning management system.
• To consider Maori specific requirements of assessment and to provide a Maori language version of the application.
• To evaluate the use of this application in tertiary teaching and to formulate recommendations for efficient and high quality assignment marking.
• To create a community for the ongoing exchange on assessment in the tertiary sector.

The project will have the following main phases:

• Requirements specification
• Software development
• Evaluation at participating institutions
• Establishment of a user community
• Preparation of good practise guides and tutorial material

The project builds on previous research on e-learning support for assignment assessment, see http://etools.massey.ac.nz/.