International ILIAS Blog

For years now, ILIAS users have had two powerful tools at their disposal for conducting online exams - Tests and Exercises. In the actual day to day practice of teaching between LMS and classroom, however, sometimes more flexibility has been desired. This is, for example, the case when a student has missed an important test that is a prerequisite to passing a particular course. But suppose the test results have already been published and the course finished – what now?

Up until now, if the tutor didn't want to create another test – for this single student – setting a new Learning Progress status was only possible with considerable effort or trickery. It wasn't possible, for example, to easily integrate an oral replacement/resit examination in ILIAS and mark it as 'passed'. The student was therefore unable to obtain a green status under 'Learning Progress'.

To remedy this situation, there is a new Object in ILIAS 5.2 - 'Individual Assessment'. Using an Individual Assessment it is now possible to register and evaluate the external achievements of individual students and also have them count towards their Learning Progress. These achievements could include oral exams, certificates gained externally or the fulfilment of other tasks outside of ILIAS.

Putting together such an Individual Assessment is really quite easy: you simply add your Individual Assessment as a new object within a course, add one or more users and then, in the next step, save the desired grading. Optionally, you can also add additional notes, for example detailing the content or grade of an external examination.

The assessment can be either saved at first as a draft or as a final result. When an assessment is finalised, the tutor can still view the assessment but no longer change things. The result triggers the Learning Progress status of the user, who receives a notification of this per e-mail.

The Individual Assessment Object will be available on all systems from ILIAS 5.2 onwards as standard.

ILIAS has been online since November 02, 1998 - a pretty long time for a web-based software. Thanks to our active community, we always get new ideas and projects for developing ILIAS. With ILIAS 5.2, the next milestone on our journey is well within reach.

Feeling younger than ever…