Online Automatic Marking of Diagrams

This article describes the way in which the Open University is expanding its online quiz engine to enable students to draw free-form diagrams in response to a quiz question. The new quiz engine automatically marks a student’s diagram and provides feedback either instantaneously when used in formative mode or later when used in summative mode. The new quiz engine is hosted within the Open University’s quiz module, OpenMark, which interfaces to the Moodle VLE which is responsible for rendering both the question and the feedback in the user’s browser. The article outlines the general nature of the diagrams that our system has been designed to deal with. This is followed by an example of the use of the new question type as implemented within our e-assessment system. The article also briefly summarizes the results of experiments carried out on the accuracy of the automatic marker and reports on feedback from students who have used the new diagramming question type.