Effective computer-Assisted assessment: Challenges and solutions

Evaluation of students' learning outcomes becomes a challenge in massive engineering course. e-Assessment has been perceived as significant aid in this task at Silesian University of Technology (SUT), Gliwice, Poland, since its introduction in 2005. In the last ten years the method has been significantly improved, based on new technology, e-pedagogy, teachers' experience and students' feedback. Introduction of 'flipped classroom' in 2012 was preceded by rearrangement of course content, in order to obtain proper relation between e-content and e-Assessment. In the first part of the paper we describe revision and modification of both resources and methodology of e-Assessment, undertaken in the last few years at the university. Numerous guidelines and good practices concerning e-pedagogy and e-Assessment design are given. As students are mostly focused on tasks which directly contribute to final grades, we propose intermediate methods of assessment, named 'formative towards summative' (FTS1, FTS2). The first method is focused on pedagogy, in particular, Bloom's taxonomy of learning outcomes and Kolb's learning cycle. The goal of the latter is the increase of effectiveness of e-Assessment, achieved by high correlation between formative activity and examination result. Information Theory approach, including Discrete Memoryless Channel model and mutual information in the channel was applied for evaluation of this correlation. Obtained results confirmed effectiveness of our approach.