Undergraduate programmes based on E-learning or B-Learning faces an important challenge in becoming a real alternative to ordinary programmes.  Taking into account students’ achievement in terms of soft skills (team work, creativity or critical thinking) or sophisticated tasks. “Second generation” E-learning represents a new way of thinking for designing on line learning environments, which is ideal to make students’ learning more meaningful.

According to the second-generation principles (1), critical changes in e-assessment that allow the analysis of undergraduate student progress in soft skills and sophisticated tasks should be introduced. This view is based on the Tomlinson report (2).

E-assessment has traditionally been used for tasks that focus on testing how students obtain the declarative knowledge, or knowing “what” such tasks have required students to select a predetermined response based on factual recall(3). Currently, innovative e-assessment formats have been developed, although the more innovative question types are becoming more commonly available in learning management systems, the predominant question type used is still the multiple-choice questions(4) . 

These challenges for assessment in an on line environment are so important that they have been defined in terms of an “Assessment 2.0” (5) .  This type of assessment would exhibit some or all of the following characteristics: Authentic, personalised, negotiated, engaging, recognising existing skills, meaningful, problem oriented, collaboratively produced, peer and self assessed and tool supported.

Some concerns that Assessment 2.0 might not be easily introduced into higher education: Firstly, the high-stakes ICT infrastructures need for developing e-assessment and the high-stakes applications for drawing up sophisticated tasks. Secondly, for teachers to be able to construct e-assessment 2.0 they need to own sophisticated skills and to dedicate significant time, which will take them away from other activities (6).

The second concern is clearly what we are going to look into. Do teachers have the skills and significant time needed to draw up e-assessment procedures and tools according to the Assessment 2.0 features? Can they construct authentic assessment and at the same time engage students in the definition of assessment criteria, the application of assessment procedures or in the marking process? Is it all too much for teachers?

The teachers’ participating in our research had been already trained to draw up e-assessment procedures and tools within the framework of the EVALCOMIX project(7). This project developed an application and asked teachers about construct assessment 2.0 in an e-learning or b-learning environment for undergraduate programmes.

Our research goals were: a) to review the e-assessment procedures and tools drawn up for teachers reviewing their adjustments to the assessment 2.0 features; b) to identify the factors that influence the best practices (teachers experiences, teachers positions, the culture and background of each university, skills or competences measured); c) and to adapt a set of resources that permits teachers to construct reasonable assessment 2.0.

(1) Adams, J. and Gareth, M. (2007). E-Learning: Characteristics and Design Principles for Supporting Management Soft-Skills Development, International Journal of E-Learning, Vol. 6, Nº. 2, 157-185. (2) Working Group on 14 – 19 Reform (2004). Curriculum and Qualifications Reform. Final Report. p. 63. (3) Bull, J., & McKenna, C. (2003). Blueprint for computer-assisted assessment. London, RoutledgeFalmer. (4) Crisp, G. (2010). Interactive e-assessment - Practical approaches to constructing more sophisticated online tasks. Journal of Learning Design, Vol.3, No. 3, 1-9. (5) Elliott, B. (2008). Assessment 2.0: Modernising assessment in the age of Web 2.0. Retrieved September 1, 2010, from http://www.scribd.com/doc/461041/Assessment-20. (6) Boyle, A and Hutchison, D. (2009). Sophisticated tasks in e-assessment: what are they and what are their benefits? Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Vol. 34, No. 3, June 2009, 305–319. (7) Ibarra, M.S (Dir.) (2008). EvalCOMIX: Evaluación de competencias en un contexto de aprendizaje mixto. Cádiz: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cádiz. http://minerva.uca.es/publicaciones/asp/docs/obrasDigitalizadas/evalcomix.pdf (8) Knight, P. (2007). Fostering and assessing ‘wicked’ competences. Milton Keynes: Open University. (9) Ibarra, M.S (Dir.) (2008). EvalCOMIX. Ibidem. (10) Ramakishnan, S., & Ramadoss, B. (2009). Assessment using multi-criteria decision approach for “high order skills” learning domains. International Journal on E-Learning, 8(2), 241-262. (11) JISC (2010). Effective Assessment in a Digital Age. A guide to technology-enhanced assessment and feedback. Bristol: HEFCE.