New portal for e-learning in Higher Education

The FREMA (e-Framework Reference Model for Assessment) project, part of the Joint Information Systems Committee’s (JISC) e-Learning Framework, is a big inter-connected portal which will house information relevant to the education community about e-learning assessment.

It has been developed by Dr David Millard and Dr Gary Wills at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), who will launch the new FREMA portal at a JISC e-Learning programme meeting on 11 October. It will be hosted by ECS at: http://frema.ecs.soton.ac.uk/wiki/

FREMA began in 2005 to help people in Higher Education to build systems for e-learning. Its goal was to develop a reference model for systems in the Assessment Domain which focus upon the creation, execution and recording of electronic assessments which are accessible across institutions and to the lifelong learner.

According to Dr Millard, FREMA is a type of wiki with all the resources representing various aspects of Assessment in Higher Education such as information on standards and funding, but it can be queried like a Knowledge Base, so that users can find gaps and trends in the domain.

'A huge advantage of this system over any similar ones is its simplicity,' said Dr Millard. 'Although it is a major Knowledge Base, it is simple enough to enable people who are not computer scientists to access it and contribute and to run queries on issues such as what standards are the most popular.'