GLASGOW, Scotland - 29th November 2004 - TOIA (Technologies for Online Interoperable Assessment - http://www.toia.ac.uk), based at the University of Strathclyde, delivered its very first web-based examination to a cohort of 59 engineering students at Hull University last Thursday afternoon. This is a major achievement for the project which is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) until August 2005. The software has been available to the UK Higher and Further education community free of charge since August and 170 such institutions have already downloaded it for installation at their own site. The idea of offering a hosted assessment management service came about when the TOIA project manager, Jalshan Sabir, started working with the HELM (Helping Engineers Learn Mathematics - http://www.lboro.ac.uk/helm) Project which offers a question bank of some 3,500 questions developed over two years. With continued development until the HELM project's end in September 2005, the team's goal is to eventually have around 7,000 CAA questions in the HELM question bank.

Jalshan said "When I started working with the HELM question bank it became obvious that the optimal way of sharing the content with other institutions was to make it available centrally. We also had the goal of making the TOIA software available to as wide a community as possible to promote the IMS specification for question and test interoperability. The time, skill and costs associated with installing and maintaining a dedicated CAA server can be a major stumbling block for some institutions and that's why we decided to pilot a hosted TOIA service."

The Universities of Hull and Oxford were the first to sign up for this service, with Hull being the very first to run a summative assessment on Thursday afternoon. As the staff member coordinating the first year engineering maths teaching, Professor Keith Attenborough said "There was a significant learning curve in respect of creating and publishing assessments and registering students as users but this has paid off in respect of substantial time saving and flexibility." Professor Attenborough added that his students seem to like using online systems and being able to tell them their marks immediately they had finished the exam was an additional bonus.

Jalshan is offering the hosted service free of charge until August 2005. This makes it ideal for institutions not having adopted CAA before to pilot the delivery of web-based assessments or to start building their own banks of questions in IMS QTI format.

The TOIA-HELM-Hull collaboration is a good example of what we can expect from the emerging JISC e-learning framework where institutions select the best available e-learning tool for a particular purpose. In the future, a question bank might be hosted with one organisation while the assessment system is based at another. A university would be in control of its assessments but leave the maintenance of the questions and the assessment system to the other organisations.

For further information on TOIA's hosted assessment management service, please visit http://www.toia.ac.uk/hosted.html.