Lately, we are witnessing changes and innovations in the assessment and evaluation systems and processes (Boud, 2006) that grant a higher prominence to students. This theoretical framework is implemented through the European Higher Education Area.

As Carless, Joughin & Mok (2006:396) claimed “assessment processes should involve students actively so as to promote the kind of dispositions they need to be lifelong learners”. Likewise, Ibarra and Gómez (2008) consider that this type of practices promote the development of competences and student’s commitment with their own learning process.  

To promote students participation and involvement in assessment there needs to be an increasement of strategies such as self-assessment, peer-assessment and co-assessment (Boud, 2010; Carless, Joughin & Mok, 2006; Falchikov, 2005; Ibarra & Rodríguez, 2011). This type of participatory actions increase students motivation, who were passive agents regarding assessment.

All the strategies mentioned above are essential in learning-oriented assessment (Carless, 2003), however, two important aspects to take into account are:

In the first place, the crucial role of professors in the LOA. As William mentioned in a recent research on formative assessment (2009) the main priority for the future of education is to design resources to help teachers to implement this type of assessment. Will teachers be able to implement authentic assessment tasks, and encourage student participation?

Secondly, the current scenario, named “e-assessment” (Boyle, A. & or Hutchison, 2009) or “Assessment 2.0” by Elliot, B (2008). Learning Management Systems (LMS), also known as Virtual Learning Environments (VLM), have been used in the learning process, at different levels for distance learning. Following Rodríguez and Ibarra (2011) the use of ICT is crucial to have an efficient and quality assessment blended learning environments. Furthermore, Boyle & Hutchison (2009) suggest that assessment questions and tasks will change substantially as the art of e‐assessment progresses. Will university teachers be able to built assessment 2.0?

EVALfor research Group has been working on these two questions, emphasizing the design of different tools to integrate teaching and assessment of soft skills using Assessment 2.0.: a product of this work is EvalCOMIX[1], a web service developed with the objective of facilitating the design of assessment instruments, in line with the new trends in evaluation and the use of these tools by the students.

This paper is part of INevalCO research project[2]. The main objective of this study is to create a repository of procedures, assessment units and tools to evaluate and assess soft skills. It is aimed to be a useful repository that university teachers could use in their practice. To reach this objective, participants had to:

1. Design processes to assess university students soft skills (communication skills, leadership, team work…)

2. Devise evaluation procedures developed through the design of Assessment Units, LAMS sequences and IMS format.

3. Design the Assessment tools needed to implement the evaluation procedures, using EvalCOMIX 3.0

[1]  EvalCOMIX Project: Skills assessment in a blended-learning context. (EA2007-0099)

[2] Innovation skills assessment: Design and development of procedures and tools for evaluating skills in blended learning or e-learning environments with undergraduates students participation. (EA2010-0052)

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