Knowledge evaluation in online educational systems

Summary form only given. In today's society, education heavily relies on information technologies and telecommunications. The educational use of computers has evolved from numerical calculations, spreadsheets and word processors, to multimedia and Web-based applications. With the rapid growth of the Internet and the increasing popularity of the WWW, Web-based educational systems are becoming more attractive and integrating more functionalities. An important functionality of these systems is knowledge evaluation. We present an overview of methods for knowledge evaluation in online educational systems, such as exams taken by students on the Internet. These systems incorporate intelligent tutoring techniques to personalize the course according to the student level of knowledge. The use of XML and the concept of "learning objects" permits the organization of the content in units which offers multiple views of the contents and puts in place self evaluation mechanisms.