NEW TRENDS IN MONITORING, TESTING AND GRADING OF STUDENTS OVER THE INTERNET

At the present time, learning management systems (LMS) represent the most adaptable and flexible method of contemporary electronic learning in which a collection of interactive programs are exclusively designed and used to develop, organize and offer online courses over the Internet. They make accessible a variety of novel online individual and group activities to prop up and complement student's self-study. Nonetheless, in order to take a full advantage of them an innovative way of testing seems to be not only necessary but also more beneficial. It is pretty evident that monitoring and testing of such virtual students must be entirely different from what we all are used to in the face-to-face lectures and in addition to that it ought to be more or less ongoing process. Those, who have an experience with e-learning, probably will agree with me, that monitoring, testing and grading of online students is quite a challenging job. To make it manageable and bearable for the online teacher, each LMS system should offer some additional built-in features that make monitoring, testing and grading of students more digestible. In this article I would like to share with you a few of my experiences that I gained during the period of last six years of the time when I was teaching online web-based undergraduate Computer and Information Science classes via WebTycho for the University of Maryland University College1 (UMUC). 1