Assessing Competencies in a serious game

The Open Universiteit and Stichting Praktijkleren are going to develop a digital examination project for the study programs ICT-administrator in the senior secondary vocational education (mbo). The project will have the form of a serious game: students will ‘work’ for a virtual agency that organizes events. It is their task to develop, test and implement an administrative system. Aim of the project is to assess in an efficient way the competencies of the students.

Assessing competencies
With the introduction of competency based education in secondary vocational education, their arose a need for new, competency based ways of testing and assessment. Stichting Praktijkleren, a national organization that supports ROC’s (schools for senior secondary vocational education) in learning within and out of the schools, wants to meet this need by developing digital examination projects with innovative educational methods and media that are widely usable in the ROC-field. The projects should be efficient and time saving for the ROC’s. They should meet the standard methodological demands of reliability, validity and usefulness, but also the new demands of competency based testing and assessment.

EMERGO
To achieve this goal, the Stichting Praktijkleren has called in the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies (CELSTEC) of the Open Universiteit. In an earlier project (2010) CELSTEC developed for ROC Zadkine a virtual on-the-job training in the field of ICT administration. This was done using EMERGO, a method and a tool for the development of serious games. The Stichting Praktijkleren wants to know if EMERGO is suitable for servicing more ROC’s and more digital examination projects. This new project has to answer this question. Apart from developing the virtual on-the-job training, CELSTEC will formulate and apply quality criteria for a digital exam project and will evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction.

The project starts in April 2011 and ends early in 2012.