The Fifth International Conference on e-Learning (eLearning-2014), 22-23 September 2014, Belgrade, Serbia INTEGRATING EXTERNAL EVIDENCES OF SKILL ASSESSMENT IN VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS JUAN ANTONIO CABALLERO University of Cadiz, EVALfor Research Group, juanantonio.caballero@uca.es MANUEL PALOMO University of Cadiz, Department of Computer Sciences, manuel.palomo@uca.es JUAN MANUEL DODERO University of Cadiz, Department of Computer Sciences, juanma.dodero@uca.es GREGORIO RODRÍGUEZ University of Cadiz, EVALfor Research Group, gregorio.rodriguez@uca.es Mª SOLEDAD IBARRA University of Cadiz, EVALfor Research Group, marisol.ibarra@uca.es Abstract: Learning Management Systems provide a set of facilities for the lecturer to create courses based on learning activities. However, assessing skills is rather limited because activities must are usually assessed with simple grades without considering the links between the activities and the skills aimed to be developed. As a consequence, limited feedback can be provided to the students, thus losing relevant information of the learning process. In this work we present a software architecture for web-based learning management systems to mitigate this issue. It consists of a web service that facilitates the assessment of skills and an extension to the browser that enables to mark and compile the evidences of assessments on web activities. The system has been applied to courses in a Moodle box where different skills that students must develop in an external wiki can be assessed while assessment evidences are tracked. All the software of this experience is fully functional and available as free software. Keywords: skills assessment, learning management system, online learning, learning web service, free software 1. INTRODUCTION In the last years, the use of the computer technologies has increased significantly. This rise has forced to do changes in educational environments, like universities or educational centres. Most of these changes are based in the use of Internet, leading new strategies in the educational process [1]. One of them is the massive installation of Learning Management System (LMS) in universities, high schools and educational centres to support learning processes. However, the learning processes can also take advantage of other technologies (those name Web 2.0): like writing blogs as handouts or using collaborative applications through Internet (for instance, wiki applications) [2]. Nowadays, the attention of higher education learning has focused in getting the skills by students, instead of getting traditional knowledge. The Bologna process in Europe (a set of international agreements to ensure comparability in the standards and quality of higher education qualifications) is an example of the use of concepts like skills or learning outcomes. The learning outcomes are defined as skills, and the students must be assessed according to the proficiency level of these skills acquired in the learning process [3]. So, the new degree and master programs and the syllabus in their courses are defined according to these concepts. The skills and learning outcomes are taught through courses and developed in specific activities in those courses. When these activities are developed in a digital artifacts some benefits are received like repeatability, producing better feedback, having a more transparent assessment process, etc. Therefore, it is necessary that the lecturers redefine new assessment strategies considering all of this. The new skill-centered learning processes cause the assessment of these skills, not only single activities. Unfortunately, most LMSs have limitations to assess skills. In most of them, every activity can be assessed only with an undimensional (usually numerical) grade and links between activities and the skills developed in them are not consider. Additionally, a detailed feedback about the skills would be desirable to support this way of assessment [4]. Again, limitations about the feedback provided to the students after an assessment have been detected in LMSs. For example, Moodle, one of the most popular LMSs, does not allow to assess specific skills and there is not any built-in mechanism to link activities with skills. Additionally, it can not provide specific feedback for skills, only a text message for every task can be shown as feedback. We propose overcoming these limitations of LMSs integrating them with external Web services. However, these integrations are not trivial. Since the first versions of