An Evaluation of Use of Ontology in Web Assessment Systems

The field of electronic learning (e-learning) has improved tremendously in the past decade with the invention of all kinds of e-leaning systems contributing to the quality of education in a significant way. The undertaken research was done to improve web assessment systems which are limited to multiple choice type of assessment which is summative assessment and does not have a feedback section to the student hence does not promote learning. The proposed system uses ontology to promote formative assessment with a feedback loop to the students so that the structured type of questions can be implemented in web assessment systems instead of using multiple choice type of questions which have limitations in terms of functionality when it comes to marking textual answers due to wide variety of words that can be used to mean the same thing. The proposed system model is to implement ontology based dictionary which generate all possible solution for a particular question which is then used in the marking process. The model also employ rules for the marking process to determine if an answer is correct or not and this gives the system an aspect of artificial intelligence.