DOCIMO: an Online Platform Dedicated to the Construction and Quality Management of Learning and Impact Assessments in the Digital Age

Abstract

The advent of a digital era (Cazeaux, 2014) and the digitization of pedagogical practices offer a favourable context for R&D deployment in evaluation engineering. Assessment methods and tools adapted to new educational environments appear today (Blais & Gilles, 2011, 2012, 2015, Davis, 2015, Fadel, Honey, & Pasnik, 2007). ICT for evaluation thus responds to the needs of learners, trainers and stakeholders in innovative training systems at local, national and international levels (Blais, Gilles & Tristan Lopez, 2015a, 2015b). Concomitantly, quality management penetrates all spheres of human activity and more and more players who attentively pay attention to the quality of the certification processes. These people ask guarantees of seriousness for evaluations in training and education. In this context, Gilles (2002) proposes a cycle of Construction and quality management of standardized tests (CGQTS). Developed with a quality approach, it comprises eight stages: analysis of the objectives of the evaluation; Design of the assessment; Development of questions databases; Information of the assessed persons; Completion of the evaluation; Correction and analysis of results; Production of feedbacks; Macro-regulation to improve future assessments. The CGQTS cycle is the model used by the online Open Source platform "DOCIMO" developed by the spin off Assess Group (www.assess-group.be), a company resulting from a university centre specialized in evaluation engineering. During this presentation, we will make a short demonstration of DOCIMO currently used by a series of partners such as the Swiss Foundation for Fine Watchmaking (FHH) in Geneva, the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Hasselt in Belgium and the University of Teacher Education of State of Vaud. We will illustrate with DOCIMO the potentialities offered by the digitization of evaluations.