A domain specific language for online learning competence assessments

Resumen

Learning outcomes in higher education are defined as competencies, which are either specific or generic. The former refersto those skills specific to the subject studied. The latter, also known as transferable skills, refer to other capabilities that acapable professional has to put into practice to work in real-world. Generic competencies are usually shared amongst mostscience fields, and include teamwork, leadership and self-criticism. These skills are inherently difficult to assess, as they arenot usually considered in traditional engineering assessment procedures. As a result, lectures usually have to assess themusing subjective information. This is especially problematic when the number of students increases. In this paper, weintroduce Simple Assessment-Specific Query Language (SASQL), a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to alleviate thisissue. It is a formal language that can be automatically processed to execute SASQL sentences using an assessment-specificvocabulary. SASQL has a simple syntax, oriented to learning assessments. Using our proposed workflow, a coursecoordinator can extract different objective indicators to assess competencies defined in the syllabus using simple queries.Such indicators are automatically extracted from the activity logs generated by the Learning Management System (LMS).Two case studies with Moodle LMS-based courses are carried out to explain how such indicators can be obtained and howto interpret the results obtained for student assessments.