1.1. Motivation
Recently, the e-learning has gained popularity among educational institutions as well as enterprises. Therefore, many commercial or open-source Learning Management Systems (LMS) have been developed. Open source is available in an efficient way promoting learning as anyone can easily access to it with free redistribution privileges (Ajlan, 2012; Cavus et al, 2014). With the increasing number of LMSs, it becomes hard to know which one to use. Researchers have developed various methods to determine which LMS is the best to use and how to define challenges features of LMSs (LMS, 2015).
While the use of these systems has gained recognition and acceptance amongst institutions, a new category of problems has arisen and need to be solved: the numerous varieties of platforms and approaches which are used in different system implementations increase the difficulty to exchange pieces of information amongst different LMS systems. Therefore, some of them have become obsolete and dedicated for specific institutions (Al-Samadi et al, 2009).
The e-assessment, as an important part of any e-learning system, faces the same challenges and problems such as problems related to portability, reusability, adaptability, integration and interoperability. For instance, we suppose that you are a learner in a university using a well specified LMS and you moved to work to other university using a different LMS. If the first LMS of your x-university is not well designed to share your assessment materials, you will not be able to use the same materials in the new LMS.
Another example, you are a teacher and you are using, separately, a LMS to achieve your e-learning tasks and a stand-alone e-assessment system to achieve your assessment activities. Both of these systems are not interoperable. Therefore, you have to register the student twice: in the LMS and in the e-assessment system, duplicating, by this, data about him/her. Consequently, you are not able to use the assessment results in the process of learning content adaptation and redesign. Despite the use of some standards of interchangeable methods by some LMSs, like SCORM, the need of personalized e-assessment standard is still not satisfied, as these standards are used to interchange the learning contents and not the e-assessment ones.
Eventually, the fairness in the e-assessment process is arising as another problem of the e-assessment. In fact, existing LMSs do not offer the same method of assessment. Moreover, in the same LMS, we need an assessment process based on well-established pedagogical scenarios. This unfairness makes evaluation of different students in the same and different establishment more difficult. Therefore, to fulfill these limits, we need an approach allowing a rigorous solution which presents a generic e-assessment process that could be used by any existing LMS.