CONCLUSION
Most of the efforts to make improvements in the educational system or the need for new options, stems from two major concepts or beliefs. The first of these is the concept of equality of opportunity. In other words, equality of opportunity is to believe that all of the individuals in society have the right to take advantage of educational experiences and opportunities. Secondly, to believe that education is one of the main factors contributing to the achievement of a series of individual and social goals. These concepts are more meaningful to the realization of distance education applications.
It can be said that distance education is equivalent to face-to-face education and situated along with it. As a result, distance education has some important features such as; settle for employees and adults, independence of facet o face meeting, independence of classes and specific place and time, from a combination of mass communication and individualization, potential of students’ independence, and its unique methods.
Thus, distance education can not be viewed just as substitute of traditional face to face education, much rather it is a different kind of education.
There are four main components of distance education programs as it is in face to face education. These components are objectives, content, teaching-learning process and measurement and evaluation. Objectives and content components of distance education programs usually show a great similarity with face to face education. Having much more and different technology and materials used in the teaching and learning process, affect the measurement and evaluation.
There are some new trends related to measurement and evaluation components of today’s distance education programs. Probably the one of the important measurement theory should be used in distance education is item response theory and one of its application is computerized adaptive testing.
Designing and using a computerized adaptive testing, CAT, the test managed by computer in which each item is introduced and the decision to stop are dynamically imposed based on the students’ answers and his/her estimated knowledge level. In CAT applications, questions answered by a student depend on the student's ability or learning level.
A major problem in measurement is cheating. Some precautions must be taken about cheating such as a live proctoring, using web cams, and using a plagiarism detection program. Taking into account of these new trends related to measurement and evaluation and apply the most appropriate measurement and evaluation methods will improve the quality of distance education programs