Online assessment at the Open University using open source software: Moodle, OpenMark and more

At the CAA conference in 2006 we reported on the Open University’s (OU) adoption of Moodle for the core of its Virtual Learning Environment (Sclater et al, 2006). This paper will describe the eAssessment developments undertaken by the OU during the past two years which have already provided new features in Moodle 1.6- 1.9 and will provide further features in Moodle 2.0. As part of this process the OU has integrated its own OpenMark assessment system (Marshall, 2007) with Moodle and together these systems have now run in excess of 125,000 tests to March 2008. While there is still much to do the OU will be reducing its financial commitment to developing these systems after July 2008 and this is a suitable time to consider the OU’s contribution to open source eAssessment systems. A commitment to open source Through 2004 and 2005 the Open University considered how best to develop its online presence. It is not the purpose of this paper to record how th