Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

117th Annual Conference on American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE)

Web-based Automated Student Learning Assessment Tool for Introductory Electrical Engineering Courses

Abstract

Establishing cost-effective procedures to obtain assessment data without excessive academic staff efforts is an important issue for most academic institutions. Assessment becomes especially problematic for large classes, because it demands excessive instructor resources. Computer- based online assessment has great potential to provide viable solutions to this problem, because web-based assessment has many unique advantages such as convenient administration, automated data collection and analysis, timely feedback, and easy update. In this paper, the online assessment for an introductory electrical engineering course we recently implemented is described. The assessment tool is developed through the popular educational software, Blackboard. The assessment functions provided by Blackboard, such as “Test Manager” and “Pool Manager”, are especially suitable for automated assessment. Our assessment project not only confirms the efficiency of online assessment, but also indicates that carefully designed web- based assessment has the great potential of improving classroom instruction and providing students opportunities of self-evaluation and quality review of the course materials.

Index Terms— Web-based assessment, blackboard, electrical engineering education

I. Introduction

It is well known that an assessment challenge facing most academic institutions is how to establish cost-effective procedures that provide necessary assessment outcomes without excessive academic staff efforts. Quality measures in education are often difficult to quantify because they depend on various factors, some of which are subjective. In addition, assessment becomes increasingly problematic for large classes, because it demands excessive instructor resources. Computer-based online assessment has great potential to provide viable solutions to many of these problems. In this paper, we present our recently developed web-based tool used for summative assessment of an introductory Electrical Engineering course at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU). Our major objective is to adopt web-based assessment to help faculty members manage workloads in spite of rising class sizes and ensure that student learning is objectively assessed in terms of targeted learning outcomes.

The assessment initiative is supported through ERAU’s University Assessment Grant funded by Office of the Provost. The initial experimentation was conducted in Fall 2008 and Spring 2009 on the course EE 335: Electrical Engineering I, which has an enrollment of around 140 students (four sections) each semester. This introductory circuit analysis course is required for students in Aerospace Engineering, Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Physics. Over the past decade, the number of students taking EE 335 has been steadily increasing and particularly so as new degrees such as Mechanical Engineering and Civil Engineering were introduced. Consequently there has been a significant challenge for quality assessment of student learning.

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Phagan, T., & Yang, T., & Liu, J., & Demikiran, I. (2010, June), Web Based Automated Student Learning Assessment Tool For Introductory Electrical Engineering Courses Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--15871