E-LEARNING AND E-ASSESSMENT FOR A COMPUTER PROGRAMMING COURSE

We have developed an e-learning and e-assessment tool for a first year university course on computer programming. The tool presents information and questions to the student and provides immediate feedback to the student regarding correctness and score. An answer may be textual, or a selection from multiple choice, or a complete computer program involving several files. When a program is required, the answer is open-ended in the sense that the contents of the program are only checked in terms of functionality. That is, the program must meet the functional specifications given in the question. The results are packaged for the instructor in a specially-formatted file that contains the questions as they were presented to the student, the student's answers, and an automated assessment. The tool is platform-independent, since it is written in Java with no particular operating system dependencies. It is capable of shuffling questions, presenting a random subset of a group of questions, and awarding partial credit for repeated tries or case mismatches (where case is important). The tool includes security features to improve evaluation integrity, including encryption of answers within the tool and encryption of student results