Piloting CAA: All Aboard

This paper examines the initial findings from a pilot project to determine the appropriateness of CAA software for university wide deployment. The various stakeholders within the institution have been identified and their opinions of CAA have been ascertained. Based on the findings a framework for incorporating CAA into modules is presented along with an analysis of the current barriers to adoption. The results suggest that there is overall support for the adoption of CAA but without support measures in staff development the uptake may be reduced

Evaluating the user experience in CAA environments: what affects user satisfaction?

This paper reports the findings of an experiment to establish students’ satisfaction with various aspects of the user interface in three Computer Assisted Assessment (CAA) environments. Forty four second year undergraduate students in Human Computer Interaction participated in the study. Each student completed three tests using three different CAA software environments. Through the use of two survey instruments, user satisfaction was measured. The results highlight the fact that, in this instance, scrolling did not seem to influence student satisfaction but other attributes, such as navigational structure and question styles, appear to influence it. The students appeared to prefer different CAA environments depending on whether the context of use was for formative or summative assessment

Heuristics for evaluating the usability of CAA applications

Evaluation of usability is well researched in the area of HCI. One widely used method is a heuristic evaluation which relies on a small number of evaluators inspecting an interface to see to what extent it complies with a set of heuristics. Once a problem is identified it is categorised to a heuristic and a severity rating is attached. Severity ratings indicate the potential impact of the problem. Using a corpus of usability problems within CAA this paper reports on the development of domain specific heuristics and severity ratings for evaluating the usability of CAA applications. The heuristics are presented and the paper concludes with practical guidance on the application of the method in CAA

Strategies for large-scale assessment: an institutional analysis of research and practice in a virtual university

Strategies for large-scale assessment: an institutional analysis of research and practice in a virtual universit