ARTÍCULO+
ARTÍCULO+
ARTÍCULO+
Ananda Maiti
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India
Abstract—Online laboratories are increasingly being de- opportunity for universities, departments, or individual
ployed in traditional on-campus as well as Web-based dis- instructors to collaborate in laboratory education. The
tance-learning courses (distance education) around the exclusive self-sufficient university will soon seize to exist,
world. An online laboratory generally will consist of several and universities shall have to both think and act globally
experiments (a module). Evaluation of student’s perform- in order to survive. Internet-based online laboratories lo-
ance and grading in laboratory courses involves quiz/viva- cated at one educational institution may be shared by an-
voce examinations, checking of experimental data and the other institution. Submission of laboratory reports (indi-
submitted laboratory report. The students submit online vidual or group) is a common practice for any laboratory
laboratory report containing experimental data, interpreta- session. However, there are frequently complaints about
tion, and extracted parameters. The submitted values are the grading of laboratory reports. Use of computers to
automatically compared and graded, with the grading crite- assist assessment of laboratory reports has been an inter-
ria decided by the instructor along with the option of esting area of research for decades [1,2].
awarding credit for the particular experiment session. In
this paper, we describe in detail a proposal on the design
In the context of online laboratory education, quality
and prototype implementation of automatic student per-
assurance seeks to balance experiment design, pedagogy,
formance evaluation and grading system in NetLAB labora- and technology with the needs of learners. Because the
tory management system (LMS) currently in use for under- quality of educational programs is valued by the adminis-
graduate and graduate online laboratories at IIT Kharag- trators, online laboratory courses should reflect a stable
pur. and repeatable process. Teaching in an online laboratory
class is different from teaching in a traditional laboratory
Index Terms—automatic evaluation, online laboratory, class room, and faculty who often lack the skills to adapt
grading system the online laboratory courses to teaching must learn new
skills in order to be effective. The acceptance of distance
I. INTRODUCTION learning technology is not automatic; much skepticism
still remains in spite of its effectiveness. In fact, the tech-
Advances in communication technology and innovative nological innovations in internet technology and commu-
methods of delivery of instruction have challenged the nications have reduced the problems of teacher-student
idea that laboratory courses can only be delivered in a interaction. It is apparent that the emergence of online
face-to-face conventional laboratory setup. In engineer- laboratory education in traditional higher education sys-
ing, for example, online (remote) laboratories are being tem will alter teaching and learning contexts. However,
used to teach thermodynamics, electronic circuits, and there is little research on the effects of these changes.
other experimental courses as well. Online laboratory are Studying various approaches for integrating communica-
e-learning systems where the learner controls and inter- tion and web technology for student’s performance
acts with hardware from a remote location. Also online evaluation is a very important issue which will address the
laboratories must be operated by a laboratory manage- role of online laboratory education. In this paper, we pro-
ment system (LMS) that make sure the experiments being pose an automatic (computer-based) student performance
performed generate the desired result and also serve the evaluation and grading technique which has been imple-
purpose of each individual user. The primary objective of mented in NetLAB laboratory management system run-
the LMS is to manage learners, keeping track of their pro- ning online laboratories (see Figure 1).
gress and performance in experiments. As the numbers of
distance learners and distance learning programs increase,
the demand for online laboratory will also increase. The
impact of Web-based laboratories on higher education is
readily apparent.
Online remote laboratories are important in several
learning situations such as in the distance learning pro-
grams. A recent poll of university administrators showed
distance learning to be among the top issues in terms of
importance and has been pushed to center stage by the
growth of the Internet and the demand for life-long learn-
ing. In some cases, experiments in conventional labora-
tory environments are too costly, time consuming, or dif-
ficult to maintain and execute individually. This offers the Figure 1. An Ideal workflow for a laboratory evaluation system
II. STUDENTS ROLE ted by other students. After successful submission of the
For proper functioning of the online laboratory, the laboratory report, the student can take part in the viva
student’s role is very important. Typically a student and which consists of online true/false, yes/no or short ques-
the LMS need to interact in the following way: tions. Both these – viva-voce performance and the labora-
tory report are checked for each experiment performed
a) Selection of laboratory experiment by student, successfully by a student. Once the student complete the
b) System opens laboratory environment, laboratory module (say consisting of 10 experiments),
c) Student joins the laboratory session, then the final grade of the student is prepared and dis-
d) System allows the full control of the equipment to played. Both the student and teacher can only see this
the student, grade. Finally, for all the laboratory users, the final grade
e) Student perform the experiment, sheet is prepared and displayed. The instructors can easily
keep this information for future reference.
f) Student passes the control to partner to conduct the
experiment (in case collaborative learning), IV. EVALUATION AUTOMATION
g) Student complete laboratory activities, such as saves In the following, we describe in detail (see Figure 5),
data etc. and logs out, how the above logistics has been incorporated in the
h) LMS closes the laboratory session, and NETLab online laboratory management system.
i) Student completes the learning objectives
A. Preliminary Quiz
III. EVALUATION STRATEGY The main motivation of online hardware-based labora-
Keeping track of each learner’s activities and progress tory experiment is to provide the facility to as many stu-
in the laboratory sessions is essential for the instructor. dents as possible and thus the number of users per instru-
The process of students’ performance evaluation (for each ment is large. It is thus necessary that a user really en-
experiment) is generally done at several stages, viz, gages the equipment only when he performs the experi-
ment. This is why a preliminary quiz is proposed and
Pre-laboratory quiz (after which a student is allowed conducted before the learner can get access to the actual
to book time and perform experiment), experiment webpage and the equipment and/or the ex-
Submission of the laboratory report after the success- perimental setup. This is done primarily to optimize the
ful completion of the experiment, and use of the instruments by making sure that the user is fa-
Appearing in the Viva-Voce for the experiment. miliar with the instruments and knows about the experi-
ment.
Once an experiment is successfully performed, the stu-
The quiz consists of several random True/False type
dent needs to save the data for analyses. After the comple-
questions about the instrument, setup, experiment and
tion of the data analyses, the student has to prepare the
fundamentals etc (see Figure 2). The user goes through
detailed laboratory report for submission. In the LMS, an
the learning materials, videos, detail of setup etc available
online submission facility is provided. The online report
for each experiment. When the user is ready to use the
submission format contains all the details from the ex-
instrument, he appears for the quiz. Only after the learner
periment done as well as the data obtained and the analy-
obtains a certain marks (set by the instructor for each ex-
sis. This file is prepared in a particular format. The up-
periment), the student is allowed to book the experiment
loaded laboratory report may be edited by the student for
time slot. The student gets the access of the experimental
some time after submission. Only the laboratory teacher
setup during this time.
has access to this report for evaluation and comments.
Students are not allowed to have access to reports submit-
42 http://www.i-joe.org
AUTOMATIC EVALUATION OF STUDENT’S PERFORMANCE IN ONLINE LABORATORIES
I. The efficiency of the management system makes the spent in grading the report, and offers a more accurate and
process very fast and can handle a large number of consistent grading scheme.
students with accuracy
II. The evaluation of the student’s performance is im-
partial (as there is no manual intervention) and the
questions are chosen randomly by the computer
VII. CONCLUSION
The world of education is facing rapid changes today
and will probably face even greater changes in the future.
With the emerging communication technologies, such as
the Internet, online laboratories are becoming a reality not
only in remote areas, but across the world. We propose
for the first time an online (automatic) performance
evaluation system for grading of students using online
laboratories. The module has been incorporated in Net-
LAB online laboratory management system at IIT
Kharagpur. Submission of online laboratory reports has
several advantages; an overall improvement of student
participation and the benefit may be attributed to in-
creased accountability since the students are graded on the
quality of their data presented. For laboratory teachers and
teaching assistants, online submission reduces the time Figure 5. Flow diagram of the automatic evaluation
Figure 6. Ideal parameter values (see column 3) for an experiment; students calculate the parameter values from their measured data and upload
them. The uploaded values are compared with the ideal values within some tolerance set by the instructor (see columns 4, 6, and 8 for tolerances set
for evaluation purposes for this experiment).
44 http://www.i-joe.org
AUTOMATIC EVALUATION OF STUDENT’S PERFORMANCE IN ONLINE LABORATORIES
REFERENCES AUTHOR
[1] A. Mottel and G. Gordon, “An algorithm for the computer evalua- A. Maiti is with the Indian Institute of Technology, In-
tion of quantitative laboratory unknowns based on accuracy and dia and is involved with development of the Virtual Labo-
precision”, Ohio J. Sci., vol. 77, pp. 63-67, 1977.
ratories (e-mail: anandamaiti@ live.com).
[2] M. Plaisent, L. Maguiraga, P. Bernard, and S. Larhrib, “Evaluat-
ing e-labs’ Experimentation”, Electronic Journal on e-Learning, This article was modified from a presentation at the REV2010 Con-
vol. 2, pp. 195-202, 2004. ference at KTH, Stockholm, Sweden in June 2010. Submitted July 15th,
2010. Published as resubmitted by the authors July 29th, 2010.