Supporting Assessment in E-learning: Collecting Students'Work and Generating Analysis Data for Assessment and Feedback

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has great influences on how learning content is delivered and how course is instructed. The use of web 2.0 tools empowers teachersand online instructors to emphasize social aspect of learning and promote in-depth discussions even when students are at a distance.Successful online collaboration is directly linked to its assessment (Swan, Shen & Hiltz, 2006). Assessment of e-learning has been challenging to teachers and online instructors. Assessing students’ collaboration, learning process and achievement through the use of e-learning tools tends to be difficult and the amount of work involves in collecting relevant information for grading can be overwhelming to teachersand online instructors. This study provides a new approach to addressing the assessment of e-learning, by automating the collection of students’ work and by generating input into the assignment module of the Learning Management Systems (LMS). Based on teachers’ pre-selected criteria, students’ learning information which describes individual participation and group interactions are collected and submitted as assignments for assessment. This new approach is intended to reduce the time and effort that teachers spend on collecting relevant data for assessing e-learning. It also generates artefacts, composed of student learning contributions, participation and interaction data, that are returned to students and underpin the marking feedback. Online discussion forum is selected as the focused tool during the initial phase of the research. A research tool implementing this new approach for the assessment of online discussions has been implemented for the Moodle LMS.