QUALITY OF E-LEARNING

The Contribution of Assessments for Enhancing the Quality of E-Learning

The Contribution of Assessments for Enhancing the Quality of E-Learning

Introduction

Techniques are needed to express quality requirements and technology has to be develop to manage and evaluate learning contents. Our approach is to underline at the centre of the learning content development process, the 'generation of a value model' such as is used in classical engineering disciplines. (Avellis,Finkelstein, 2002, 10-20) A key component of the development process is achieving a model of what is valued in the resulting learning content. Using this view, quality characteristics are not externally imposed on a development process but 'constructed' within it. This paper discusses the Contribution of Assessments for Enhancing the Quality of E-Learning.

How might you best use assessment strategically- to encourage and reward the kinds of learning activities and outcomes that we believe are desirable?

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) as a method has been used in several projects in Software Engineering, such as NATURE project (Novel Approach to Theories Underlying Requirements Engineering) to enhance the communication between developers of different views. It is based on reconciled planning and communication procedures arranged in a form called House-of-Quality (HoQ). Most of the today QFD implementations neglect its communication aspects. QFD has been improved with approaches used in the area of Computer Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW) as well as Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) to lead to a new generation of QFD tool(Avellis et al. 2003, 13-20).

If assessment is to be truly integrated into the curriculum, then we need to ensure that it positively impacts on student learning. For many years, educators have been talking about educational or "authentic" assessment, in which the tasks we set students mirror the learning outcomes expected of them. In medical practice, doctors are faced with patients who present with problems, requiring knowledge to be accessed in a particular fashion (as well as skills and attitudes). As students, it is therefore essential that they face the same patient-based scenarios that they will encounter in medical practice. In more innovative curricula such as case-based medicine or problem-based learning, several institutions have thus expended considerable effort on developing more appropriate or authentic assessment methods which measure expected outcomes (i.e. problem-solving and critical reasoning skills(Avellis, Finkelstein 2005, 146-148). In traditional discipline-based curricula, the task of 'authentic' assessment is perhaps more challenging, because, with the clinical/preclinical divide, students might not appreciate the relevance of the basic medical sciences in the context of medicine.

Since assessment is an inextricable part of the curriculum, students also need to view it as a positive influence on their learning. The present investigation reports on the sentiments of two cohorts of second year medical students with regard to a reward system operating in the Histology course in a volume overloaded traditional curriculum in which students write approximately 32 tests in as many weeks. Recognising the shortcomings of the traditional curriculum, the medical programme has been revised, and a more student-centred curriculum (problem-based learning) (Avellis 2008, 12-98)was implemented in January ...