Multimedia interfaces for alternative assessment methods that improve engineering education

The full potential for assessment to contribute to the educational process of engineering students is typically unrealized. The main difficulty (apart from the natural inertia and reluctance to change of large institutions) is the infeasibility of implementing more effective alternatives in the resource-limited settings typical of modern educational environments. We present a system architecture that exploits multimedia technology to overcome serious limitations of traditional assessment methods. Our work concerns the design of cost-effective confidence-measuring and performance-testing assessment vehicles using multimedia-based student-system interaction. We demonstrate feasibility of the conceptual foundation through embodiment in a set of prototypes