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

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.