Interactive assignment: A Moodle component to enrich the learning process

Nowadays, people are proactive concerning Web-related issues and reasons for that could be explained by the availability of Web systems and the immediate response they provide. The same is also true whenever considering web-based courses. In this context, interactivity and automatic assessment may be responsible for keeping the learners' motivation. Also, these characteristics may promote active learning. Currently, Moodle is one of the most popular Learning Management System (LMS) to support courses through the Web. However, since it is a general system, if the subject to be taught or learnt is related to Mathematics there is a lack of interactive modules to be integrated with LMS in general, Moodle in particular. In this paper we present Interactive Assignment (i-Assign), a package to be integrated into Moodle in order to improve interactivity and promote automatic assessment of interactive activities developed using e-Learning Modules (e-LM). e-LM are interactive Java applets that supports the teaching and learning process of specific subjects and may offer resources for automatic assessment of solved activities, providing instantaneous feedback for learners concerning their performance.