The traditional Learning Management System (LMS) is designed to serve as a portal between educators and their learners. Platforms like Moodle are successful in facilitating cooperative online learning in a number of groundbreaking ways: course management, interactive discussion boards, assignment submissions, and delivery of learning content. While all of this is great, we’ve yet to see an LMS that implements best practices in assessment and psychometrics to ensure that medium or high stakes tests meet international standards.
To put it bluntly, LMS systems have assessment functionality that is usually good enough for short classroom quizzes but falls far short of what is required for a test that is used to award a credential. A white paper on this topic is available here, but some examples include:
- Treatment of items as reusable objects
- Item metadata and historical use
- Collaborative item review and versioning
- Test assembly based on psychometrics
- Psychometric forensics to search for non-independent test-taking behavior
- Deeper score reporting and analytics
Assessment Systems is pleased to announce the launch of an easy-to-use bridge between FastTest and Moodle that will allow users to seamlessly deliver sound assessments from within Moodle while taking advantage of the sophisticated test development and psychometric tools available within FastTest. In addition to seamless delivery for learners, all candidate information is transferred to FastTest, eliminating the examinee import process. The bridge makes use of the international Learning Tools Interoperability standards.
If you are already a FastTest user, watch a step-by-step tutorial on how to establish the connection, in the FastTest User Manual by logging into your FastTest workspace and selecting Manual in the upper right-hand corner. You’ll find the guide in Appendix N.
If you are not yet a FastTest user and would like to discuss how it can improve your assessments while still allowing you to leverage Moodle or other LMS systems for learning content, sign up for a free account here.
