OAES: Scalable and Secure Architecture for Online Assessment and Evaluation System

The emerging issues identified for online education are the role of the teacher, student participation and assessment. Conducting effective assessments in a large-scale environment for online education is one of the biggest challenge. Quality of examination gets affected by issues emerging from assessment instrument quality and evaluation centered errors. Online Assessment and Evaluation System (OAES) proposed in this paper is developed to assess students abilities using diverse assessment methods using 15 unique item types which can be automatically evaluated. OAES provides unified management of five modules of an examination system which includes item authoring, examination administration, examination, evaluation and data transfer. OAES is designed using a scalable architecture enabling expanding of users and roles in an extremely manageable way. The transfer of data among modules is handled by an unique encryption and decryption process. Preliminary testing and self evaluation using ISO 9126 quality model is conducted. OAES has shown the potential to be well received by administrators, instructors and students.