General help

This sort of skill testing has always been difficult to authenticate in an online environment. The question is whether the person logging in, is the same person who is enrolled. Without the usually expensive and often tempramental software, it is hard to ensure the candidate is the right person. 

What is the targeted environment? Business, College, Training school, University, Secondary School? Or is it all online, a remote learning situation? Each situation has some benefits that can lend themselves to a partial solution, and that is all it is, a partial solution, because nothing is guaranteed. All I have usually relied upon is the honesty of the candidate, which is easy to ensure if I am the Invigilator. I have used email to provide a code to access an activity, but not in Moodle, (don't know if that one would even fly in Moodle). With online things, it is even more difficult. In these things, there is likely no right answer,  I don't think I have one, someone else may have something. 

However, having said that, mostly remote students use laptops, with webcams. The testing software could include a photo if the Candidate, taken at the time of testing. Things like keystroke loggers and that are not just an intrusion on people, they are an outright threat and I would never suggest they be used at any time. I expect that anything that does that will be outlawed in the EU soon anyway, if not already, so I wouldn't go there. Other countries will follow suit, I expect. 

I used to teach office applications and never bothered to try and automate document evaluations via quizzes the way you mention. I did use multiple choice question based quizzes for making sure they knew office applications vocabulary, tools, locations of items on menus, etc. But, when I wanted to see a student, "format the title of a document," I had them create a whole document and submit it in an assignment. The built in capability of Moodle to convert files to PDF's was very handy and allowed me to mark up their submissions, just as I would if they had submitted the assignment as hard copy on paper. When I bought myself a tablet with pen, it just got even easier to grade.

Being a middle school teacher, I also converted to using the free Open Office/LibreOffice so that any of my students could practice at home without having to try to convince their parents to throw money away on M$ Office. I actually had many students who later took college MS Office classes and used LibreOffice for all the work as each application, Writer, Calc, Impress, etc. could save in Office format or export as a PDF.

As an added bonus, since LibreOffice also included LO Draw, I introduced them to how simple it was to make their own vector graphic pictures.

Hi all,

We are currently developing a system like the one Joe Hardy is asking for.

We have Office tests both for the online version of Office and for their desktop versions.

As Joe described, the student is asked to perform an action or actions on a document and/or spreadsheet and then our software checks the document (it doesn’t monitor key clicks) and grades the student’s answer.

AL Rachels, we also have the same software for Apache OpenOffice (https://www.test4u.eu/en/e-tests/apache-openoffice) and LibreOffice(https://www.test4u.eu/en/e-tests/libreoffice/).

But what Joe needs is a way to integrate this to moodle.

This feature is almost ready. The teacher will be able to assign certain questions to its students from our vast list of questions (almost 40000 in total). Then the students will solve the questions and they will be automatically graded from TEST4U. The results will be send back to the teacher instantly and shown in moodle. We are in the process of making this whole process fully SCORM compatible in order to be able to integrate it to every SORM compatible system out there.

As far as the testing system that Colin Fraser talked about for remote examination without keyloggers, this is an almost completed project as well.

We have implemented the process of taking photo of the student, in random intervals, which ensures he/she is in front of the PC during the exam and we have taken it a step further. We are able to monitor if there are any remote-control software operated on the student’s PC (such as remote desktop or Teamviewer), which would mean that someone else is taking the exam instead of the student and stop the examination process.

You should expect these pretty soon, but meanwhile you can take a look in TEST4U which will be the main part of both of these applications.

https://www.test4u.eu/

For a limited time TEST4U is completely free for all educational institutes, which means that any teacher in a school, college or university can provide it to their students for free until the end of 2018.

Just follow the link: https://www.test4u.eu/en/free-test4u-1