Learning is the only way of developing the necessary competences in the new economy and e-learning is a strategic instrument in this process. E-learning platforms must not be just tools of content distribution of pedagogical resources and not taking into account the real interests of the learners: “...without personalization, e-learning is only ever going to be a generic mass produced experience and will tend towards a model of teaching that makes the computer a virtual lecturer, rather than a virtual personal tutor” (Ashman et al., 2009). In order to correct this drawback of e-learning, coming from the lack of personalization, researchers and educators try to use various methods: evolutionary algorithms, personalized e-testing rules, adaptive feedback or exploiting recommender engines, connected to learning applications. All these methods are briefly described in this paper, in the context of e-assessment in project management (PM) domain. The interest towards the e-assessment services in e-learning environments is explained by the applicability of the e-assessment in various types of education, from formal education, in schools and universities, to work-based education and preparation activities for obtaining professional certifications. The interest for the PM domain is explained by project, as main form of organization in current economy.
In order to improve learning effectiveness, the formative dimension of e-assessment hasbeen increasingly developed: it isn’t regarded only as an evaluation tool, but also as a learning tool. Formative assessment is defined as “an ongoing process of monitoring learners’ progresses of knowledge construction” (Hsu et al., 2010) or “the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there” (Assessment Reform Group (ARG), 2002). Its value was greatly appreciated by researchers: formative e-assessment promotes self-reflection and students can take control of their own learning (Pachler et al., 2010). The authors argue that it fills a knowledge gap, that’s why formative e-assessment has an important role in learning and training. It is well-used in organizational learning (Bodea & Dascalu, 2010), being known as “assessment for learning” (Birenbaum et al., 2009).
This chapter proposes an adaptive formative e-assessment system, useful in preparing for project management professional certifications. The chapter has several parts. The first one is introductory. In the second part, the authors briefly present a set of formative e-assessment systems used in project management training. In the third part, some theoretical models used in the implementation of the systems are revealed, as well as the state of the art in e-assessment. In the fourth part, the main technical and functional considerations of the developed system are presented. The fifth part consists of the main experimental results. In the sixth and the seventh parts, the future directions and the main conclusions are drawn.
The proposed e-assessment system proved to be an efficient one, from the point of view of its performance and utility. Compared to other e-testing approaches (such as dynamic testing), our solution turned out to be more suitable for large item banks. As a formative learning tool, our solution helped the students to obtain a lower rate of failure and a sharper learning progress curve. There are a few shortcomings of the proposed system, from the point of view of the trainers: they would want to benefit from predefined tests, to add video materials within the solution or to build criteria for rules creation. Still, these improvements can be solved in the feature. The results of the system’s evaluation are good enough, that is why one can consider that our e-assessment proposal is an improvement in the area of adaptive e-assessment. Thanks to its formative value, it can be easily used by firms to develop employees’ competences.
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