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

Area of Science:

• Educational Technology
• Computer Science

Background:

• The rise of open learning environments necessitates scalable e-assessment solutions.
• There is a growing demand for efficient methods to assess frequently required Office skills in education and business.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and validate a novel automated assessment system for Office skills in authentic contexts.
• To leverage Extensible Markup Language (XML) for transforming and comparing student work against established patterns.

Main Methods:

• Documents and answers were converted into an XML format.
• Skills were extracted as patterns from a teacher's correct document.
• Similarity measures were used to compare student documents against these patterns for grading.

Main Results:

• An experimental study validated the approach for Word processing skills assessment.
• The developed system was successfully evaluated in a real exam scenario.
• The results demonstrated the accuracy and suitability of the automated assessment method.

Conclusions:

• The proposed XML-based system offers an accurate and suitable method for automated Office skills assessment.
• This approach effectively addresses the challenges of large-scale e-assessment in open learning environments.
• The research validates the potential of XML technologies in creating robust educational assessment tools.