Students' grading control and visualisation in competence-based learning approach

This paper analyses how students familiarize themselves and cope with novel competence-based approach to learning in online e-learning environment where the focus is on personal learning. Learners have freedom to mark their own path through the courses without deadlines by choosing themselves what, when and how much they learn. That methodology concentrates on measuring what a person can actually do as a result of learning. In order to have that kind of detailed picture of everyone's abilities, different kind of approach for assessment was developed using automatic algorithms that mimic student's answering process with small repeatable exercises. As every competence is being graded separately with high level of granularity, one definitive final grade requires a more complex aggregation function to be designed. Grades are suggested for students when enough work has been done and on their own discretion they can either accept that result or keep working to achieve a higher grade. As this kind of personalized approach to learning leaves all responsibility of planning to a learner, they have to have a proper overview of their own progress and an access to sufficient data in order to make educated learning decisions. To facilitate that problem five different student's progress visualization tools were offered to students. Their usage, benefits and drawbacks according to students' feedback have been analyzed. The conclusions drawn are that visual tools have helped majority of students to follow their process better than before and every student prefers different kinds of tools depending on their personality. While some students have benefited a lot from the freedoms offered by the system, others had hard time motivating themselves to work and therefore found it to be difficult to complete the course on time.