Implementation and evaluation of a WWW multiple choice question server

Abstract

For the winter semester of 1995, the Department of Informatics at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) introduced new courseware for teaching Pascal to students in Civil Engineering.

The courseware replaces traditional, paper exercises and was created using WebDidact, a courseware environment based on the World Wide Web (WWW) distributed hypermedia system that has been developed by the EPFL's Computer Aided Learning Laboratory. The courseware exercises consisted of multiple choice questions (MCQs) with detailed explanations made available via the hyper-text capabilities of WWW.

Evaluation of the courseware was made from the perspective of both the instructor and the students. In the former case, we found that computer based exercise sessions required less supervision than the traditional exercise sessions. From the students' point of view, statistical evidence from their performance on the mid-term exam led us to conclude that paper-based exercises can safely be replaced by our MCQ courseware. Feedback from the students indicated that they were generally satisfied with the computer based exercises.