Due to the depicted possibilities of assessment for e-learning, this section reports about a study comparing different assessment methods within online courses. The study introduced in this paper was realised at the Graz University of Applied Sciences Campus02 and describes an online course about the topic “document formats” within the area of adult education. The course carried out over a period of two month was realised according to a full virtual concept using a customised version of the e-learning platform Moodle.
Although the course deals with basics of information technology, attempts were made towards reaching the whole set of competencies and even some higher levels of objectives. Characterising the e-learning course with reference to Bloom’s taxonomy, the learning objectives comprise five “Level I”, four “Level II”, and two “Level III” objectives of the cognitive domain, two “Level III” objectives of the psychomotor domain as well as one “Level III” objective of the affective domain (see table 2 in the next section). To compare the different assessment methods, three e-learning courses were implemented and each student was assigned to one of these courses according to the achievement levels of a topic-related lecture. The courses are characterised in the following ways: