"The Distance Education over Internet - web questionnaires" project has been designed and implemented by MSc. students John Sjöberg and David Lilljegren, Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Sweden. The project was supervised by Ing. Eduardo Fernandez at CeCal, Universidad de la República Montevideo, Uruguay, and is part of a larger project aiming to provide economical and technological means for distance education at university level in Uruguay.

Objective of the project

The basic idea with the project is to give teachers, giving courses at  the Universidad de la República the possibility to easy create web pages containing question forms. These forms could then be accessed using a standard browser (such as Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Internet Explorer) and answered by a student participating to a course at the university. A student could either  attend a course locally, held at the university were he/she lives, or from a remote location.

The students answers to the forms could either be saved on a server, for later retrieval by the teacher (web exam), or they can be corrected immediately by the web page, giving the student direct response. The latter, the auto evaluation type, is intended to provide means for the student to test himself; for example after having read parts of the course material (which also could be accessible on the Internet). Beside the above mentioned possibility for the teacher to create pages and view students answers, the system developed also includes a course administration facility for creation of new courses and registration of students.

The system is built up using only Internet technologies. Thus all user-computer interactions can performed using a standard Internet browser. This is essential for a system of this type as both the students and the teachers could be expected to use different hardware and operating systems.

Basic concepts

Below is an overview of some the terminology used in this paper.

• Student, person attending a subject/course, most important (here) by answering QuestionPages.
• Teacher, physical person responsible for a course. The teacher creates a course and the QuestionPages.
• Subject/Course,  used through the whole report interchangeably. A subject is created by a teacher. It contain the students of the course and the QuestionPages associated with the course. The system as a whole could contain independent courses/subjects managed by different teachers.
• QuestionPage, a form page written in HTML and JavaScript, used to query students. A QuestionPage is made up of an unlimited number of subquestions.
• Subquestion, a question on a QuestionPage which students are supposed to answer.
• QuestionPage type, depending on the type of subquestion the QuestionPages are divided in different types. Currently three types of QuestionPages are supported, cross, alternative and written.
• cross, a QuestionPage type using question and answer pairs.
• alternative, a QuestionPage type using multiple choice questions.
• written, a QuestionPage type using free text answers.
• Feedback mode, a QuestionPage could be in two feedback modes. In mode auto the student is directly informed if the answers given were correct. While in mode send the student answers are save on the server.
• Applet, a small program written in Java that could run inside most Internet browsers.
• CGI (Common Gateway Interface), an interface that allows an applet or a HTML page to communicate with a server.
• Server, a remote computer to which a client can connect, e.g. through a Internet browser.