ELIAS (Electronic Integrated Assessment System)

Devised by and developed under the supervision of Professor K K B Hon at The University of Liverpool Department of Engineering, the ELIAS system aims to integrate and streamline the process of assignment setting, submission and marking by facilitating a web based interface to an integrated assessment system.

The system aims to allow a lecturer to set an assignment which will then appear in the individual profiles of applicable students. The students are provided with an automated "diary" which indicates due and overdue assignments, and allows then to submit their assignments to their lecturers within a couple of mouse clicks.

Academics can download the submitted work, mark it using a digital graphics tablet and send it back to ELIAS as a marked copy of the document. The student is then able to see the work in it's marked form, together with the mark awarded.

Course Directors and Module Co-ordinators are also able to view full reports detailing the averages, standard deviations and submission rate for modules or courses.

Design Considerations

ELIAS proved to be the biggest technical challenge faced by Reflux so-far. We were given free reign over choice of operating system and we chose Red Hat Linux and MySQL for this "proof of concept" job. The back end databases and their associated SQL queries were all designed by hand and the entire site is written in Perl using a more secure version of the custom Session Management System and the Proprietry Server Side Includes System which is the same as that used to power the password protected sections of the Backstage Website.

Although the sheer amount of information being stored and processed proved to be a generator of many a headache during development, the biggest problem was providing a secure method of storing the documents, so that plagiarism could be prevented as much as possible.

The documents are stored in a secure location, separate from the ELIAS engine and it is this that caused the problem. If we had stored the files below the web server publishing root, it was feasible that anyone could download the file if they knew the path and filename. After 7 solid days of drawing, redrawing and testing, we finally engineered a suitable solution. For security reasons, it is not possible to deliver an explanation of the working of this system, suffice to say that it works better than was expected.

The End Result

ELIAS is now at the Release Candidate stage, currently RC1. It is awaiting full beta testing while the involved parties are unable to attend. This work should be completed around September time. It then remains to be seen just how effective the system is at improving the management of assignments and cutting down students' printing costs.

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