Moodle questionnaires as a self-assessment tool for meeting the challenges of diversity in students' background knowledge

Abstract

Process Automation and Advanced Control is a subject of the master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from the Universitat Jaume I de Castelló that seeks to develop the students’ ability to design automated production systems and advanced process controllers. In order to properly acquire the specific competences of this master’s degree subject, the students should master some basic concepts of control systems that are generally acquired at a bachelor’s degree level. The teachers of the subject find that the background knowledge of the master students is diverse because the students have studied different bachelor’s degrees at different European universities. The content of the subject being dense, the lecturers have little room for manoeuvre in order to review and reinforce this necessary prior knowledge during the lessons. In this work, we present a tool that allows the students to self-assess their prior knowledge. The tool has been implemented in Moodle and it consists of a variety of questionnaires with instantaneous feedback that guides each student on the learning materials that he should review in order to fill his gaps in background knowledge.