FORMATIVE E-ASSESSMENT TOOL TO FACILITATE THE TRAINING OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROFESSIONALS

Professional certifications sustain lifelong learning through the continuous development of competencies required in a workplace. The current paper proposes a tool to facilitate the training of professionals who want to obtain a project management certification awarded by the International Project Management Association (IPMA). The tool makes the automatic evaluation of answers to open questions and gives feedback, thus providing the users the chance to learn from their own mistakes. The text-based answers are transformed into ontological representations, exploiting several technologies and open-source tools, such as GATE, WordNet, Text2Onto, OpenNLP, Protege. Then, an ontology alignment process is implemented, to compare the newly formed ontology of a given answer to the reference ontology of a correct answer, from the certification evaluators' point of view. If some concepts regarding a specific topic are not covered in the user's answer, the program returns the concepts which the user did not sustain and it suggests some references in order to enrich his/her knowledge in that direction. The success of the feedback is given by the built-in vocabulary, which is continuously improved by project management experts. We consider that the tool is a valuable instrument of formative e-assessment; allowing the users the possibility of self-evaluation and learning in one's own pace. Furthermore, the majority of similar tools deal only with multiple-choice questions, but the open questions are the ones which require extensive expert assistance to provide useful feedback to wannabe certified project management professionals. Thus, our tool feels the gap in automated formative assessment, being presented in the context of innovative tools to support well-being through lifelong learning.