XML-based e-assessment system for Office skills in open learning environments

Abstract

Learning and teaching systems have seen fast transformations being increasingly applied in emerging formal and informal education contexts. Indeed, the shift to open learning environments is remarkable, where the number of students is extremely high. To allow a huge amount of learners gaining new knowledge and skills in an open education framework, the recourse to e-assessment systems able to cover this strong demand and respective challenges is inevitable. Facing Office skills as those most frequently needed in education and business settings, in this paper, we address the design of a novel assessment system for automated assessment of Office skills in an authentic context. This approach exploits the powerful potential of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format and related technologies by transforming the model of both students' documents and answers to an XML format and extracting from the teacher's correct document the required skills as patterns. To assign a mark, we measure similarities between the patterns of the students' and the teacher's documents. We conducted an experimental study to validate our approach for Word processing skills assessment and developed a system that was evaluated in a real exam scenario. The results demonstrated the accuracy and suitability of this research direction.

Effects of a peer tutor recommender system (PTRS) with machine learning and automated assessment on vocational high school students' computer application operating skills

“…Automated assessment technologies developed to analyze student-produced documents are classified into four categories: (1) visual basic for applications (VBA), (2) component object model (COM), (3) extensible markup language (XML) technology, and (4) artificial intelligence (AI) and other techniques (Chorana et al 2015).…”

“…The scoring criteria file representing the requirements for an IT skills assignment and containing required style information for checkable items, such as bold and page numbering, was configured using XML. Chorana et al (2015) provided a simplified fully automated assessment approach with a standard representation using XML. Similarity between the teacher's correct and student's produced documents was measured using an XML tree representation.…”

Impact of the Web Application for the Educational Process on the Compound Interest Considering Data Science

“…Finally, technology is modifying the activities carried out in formal and informal education contexts (Chorana, Lakhdari, Cherroun, & Oulad-Naoui, 2015). For example, the creation of web applications facilitates the assimilation of knowledge, allows the development of skills and increases the motivation of students during the learning process (Gauthier & Jenkinson, 2018;Yeh, Chang, & Chen, 2019).…”

An intelligent tutoring system for supporting active learning: A case study on predictive parsing learning

“…These learners have no freedom to propose new exercises that they might come up with. Recent research has focused on open learning environments, where the set of exercises is not limited to a predefined set, or where the learners can create new exercises [20] , [21] , [22] , [23] , [24] , [25] , [26] . These systems provide a language that enables the generation of exercises and the communication with the learners, which may be a standard language (e.g.…”

“…These systems provide a language that enables the generation of exercises and the communication with the learners, which may be a standard language (e.g. eXtensible Markup Language – XML) [22] , [26] or a Domain Specific Language (DSL) specifically designed for the problem to be solved [23] , [24] , [25] . On the other hand, there are systems that focus on the ability for the students to create exercises on their own initiative and upload them into the system, which will solve them and explain how the solutions are reached [20] , [21] .…”