COMPUTER-BASED TOOLS FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING PROCESSES IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Assessment of learning processes is an essential part of the educational practice. On the one hand, it allows evaluating the knowledge, skills and attitudes achieved by the students; on the other hand, results can be used to make decisions for the improvement of the educational practices. The success of e-learning has allowed the emergence of new computer-based tools designed to enhance each stage of the educational process. Information technologies applied to education and particularly the use of Internet allow the creation of interactive self-assessment tests that can be useful tools to motivate students in learning tasks and to check their progress previously to be definitely examined. Computer-based assessment (CBA) offers the following advantages against traditional paper-based exams: grades and feedback can be immediately provided to the student; greater flexibility in the location and the time to carry out the exam is allowed; interactive activities and multimedia tools can be incorporated to the assessment process; teacher's interpretations and legibility problems are avoided; and time and cost effectiveness, among others. Disadvantages include: authoring and security possible failures, additional work for teacher to generate tests, possible technical failures and difficulties to carry out and automatically mark certain types of exams (e.g. essay questions or engineering problems, etc.). The paper discusses the technical features required by computer-based assessment software to be used in higher education courses. A comparative analysis of different applications to conduct on-line and off-line exams has been carried out, with particular attention to the available types of questions, the possibility of incorporating multimedia content to the exams, the possibility of creating and managing a bank of questions, available test generation options (i.e. maximum number of questions, time control, number of attempts,...), scoring options or the ability to provide feedback to the students on their answers, among some other questions.