Work in progress - a Web-based visual system for assessment generating

This paper introduces a project: creating a software system, VISAGE, which can generate an assessment automatically. The project not only provides a useful tool to our teachers and students, it also provides an experimental bed for Web-based software development and maintenance. VISAGE is implemented on the ASP.NET platform with Web client server architecture and XML support. Like most of the Web-based learning/assessment systems, the system produces multiple versions of an assessment, accepts parameters and creates different levels of difficulty for a question. This paper introduces a special feature of the system, which is the visual representation of the questions and the assessment structures, allowing the users to construct an assessment visually. For implementation, we need to address issues of direct manipulating graphical objects within a Web-based client server environment. This paper describes and discusses the system requirements, architecture and data storage, as well as the visual environment and visualization framework. It also discusses the design and creation of the learning objects.