Service-oriented flexible and interoperable assessment: towards a standardised e-assessment system

Free-text answers assessment has been a field of interest during the last 50 years. Several free-text answers assessment tools underpinned by different techniques have been developed. In most cases, the complexity of the underpinned techniques has caused those tools to be designed and developed as stand-alone tools. The rationales behind using computers to assist learning assessment are mainly to save time and cost, as well as to reduce staff workload. However, utilising free-text answers assessment tools separately form the learning environment may increase the staff workload and increase the complexity of the assessment process. Therefore, free-text answers scorers have to have a flexible design to be integrated within the context of the e-assessment system architectures taking advantages of software-as-a-service architecture. Moreover, flexible and interoperable e-assessment architecture has to be utilised in order to facilitate this integration. This paper discusses the importance of flexible and interoperable e-assessment. Moreover, it proposes a service-oriented flexible and interoperable architecture for futuristic e-assessment systems. Nevertheless, it shows how such architecture can foster the e-assessment process in general and the free-text answers assessment in particular

USING BLOCKCHAIN TO BUILD DECENTRALIZED ACCESS CONTROL IN A PEER-TO-PEER E-LEARNING PLATFORM

In the context of E-learning platforms, the amount of research focusing on access control is proliferating. However, research related to the decentralized access control in this field is scarce. To improve such area of research, an innovative model of decentralized access control used to protect the collaborative peer-to-peer E-learning platform has been proposed. In this model, the integrity, authenticity, non-repudiation and traceability of E-learning resources are ensured by using Blockchain platform. Also, RESTful web service and Go/Java programming language will be used as tools to implement this model. A key metric is measured to evaluate the proposed model: average response time. To increase the accuracy, some experiments (144) have been carried out. The same experiment is conducted in two comparatively different network environment: Local Area Network (LAN) and Cloud Web Service (such as Amazon Web Service). LAN running environment represents the optimal condition while Cloud environment stands for the actual condition in the real world. When the number of clients in my proposed E-learning platform is relatively small (consisting of one to thirty concurrent clients interacting with E-learning resources), the average response time in the LAN environment is much faster (nearly 1.5 times) than that in Cloud environment. Nevertheless, when the number of clients is on a large scale, the difference of average response time between this two environment becomes insignificant. Besides, adding servers in both environments can increase the horizontal scalability. Furthermore, adding servers in Cloud environment can boost the system performance dramatically. However, extending the delay could have an impact on the system performance but negligible

Programming exercises evaluation systems: an interoperability survey

Learning computer programming requires solving programming exercises. In computer programming courses teachers need to assess and give feedback to a large number of exercises. These tasks are time consuming and error-prone since there are many aspects relating to good programming that should be considered. In this context automatic assessment tools can play an important role helping teachers in grading tasks as well to assist students with automatic feedback. In spite of its usefulness, these tools lack integration mechanisms with other eLearning systems such as Learning Management Systems, Learning Objects Repositories or Integrated Development Environments. In this paper we provide a survey on programming evaluation systems. The survey gathers information on interoperability features of these systems, categorizing and comparing them regarding content and communication standardization. This work may prove useful to instructors and computer science educators when they have to choose an assessment system to be integrated in their e-Learning environment

An Examination of Online Learning Security Requirements Within a Virtual Learning Environment of an Irish University

As the adoption of e-learning and need for lifelong learning increases, it is vital the administrator of a virtual learning environment continually ensures reliable and secure data. This case study engaged in the initial steps of analyzing the use and security needs of a virtual learning service within a university of Ireland. The university provided two virtual learning services which were comparatively analyzed, from a security and data protection perspective. In addition, survey results obtained from the university user community for one of the e-learning services were examined. Findings from the study were presented as user security requirements and recommendations, when planning future security initiatives of the e-learning services within the university

Integrating open services for building educational environments

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.I. D. Carlos, R. Cobos, E. Guerra, J. de Lara, A. Pescador, and J. Sánchez Cuadrado, “Integrating Open Services for Building Educational Environments”, in Global Engineering Education Conference, Berlin (Germany), 2013, pp. 1147-1156The increasing popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has raised the need for highly scalable, customizable, open learning environments. At the same time, there is a growing trend to open the services that the companies offer on the web with open APIs and in the form of REST services, facilitating their integration in customized applications. The goal of this work is to show how such open services can be used for the support of on-line educational systems. These services were not created for an education context, so it is necessary to complement it with functionalities for supporting aspects such as evaluations, monitoring or collaboration. This article discusses on the strategies for integrating services for education and presents two cases studies: first, SMLearning, a collaborative learning environment supported by social media platforms Facebook and YouTube, and second, an application for project-based programming courses, customized through a generative architecture, making heavy use of Google services.This research was partly funded by the Spanish National Plan of R+D, project number TIN2011-24139; and by the Autonomous Community of Madrid, e-Madrid project, number S2009/TIC-1650

Toward the Cross-Institutional Data Integration From Shibboleth Federated LMS

Through this study, we aim to examine a method for data integration in shared Learning Management System (LMS) in authentication federation. We proposed a method of transmitting ePTID and learning data with user’s consent as a method for data integration across institutions. The method is compared with the other existing methods to realize the shared LMS. We discuss the suitable method for next version of GakuNinMoodle and conclude that our requirements are not fully satisfied by a single method

Digital Management of Competencies in Web 3.0: The C-Box® Approach

Management of competencies is a crucial concern for both learners and workers as well as for training institutions and companies. For the former, it allows users to track and certify the acquired skills to apply for positions; for the latter, it enables better organisation of business processes. However, currently, most software systems for competency management adopted by the industry are either organisation-centric or centralised: that is, they either lock-in students and employees wishing to export their competencies elsewhere, or they require users’ trust and for users to give up privacy (to store their personal data) while being prone to faults. In this paper, we propose a user-centric, fully decentralised competency management system enabling verifiable, secure, and robust management of competencies digitalised as Open Badges via notarization on a public blockchain. This way, whoever acquires the competence or achievement retains full control over it and can disclose his/her own digital certifications only when needed and to the extent required, migrate them across storage platforms, and let anyone verify the integrity and validity of such certifications independently of any centralised organisation. The proposed solution is based on C-Box®, an existing application for the management of digital competencies that has been improved to fully support models, standards, and technologies of the so-called Web 3.0 vision—a global effort by major web organisations to “give the web back to the people”, pushing for maximum decentralisation of control and user-centric data ownership