The frst years in engineering degree courses are usually made of large groups with a low teacher-student rato. Overcrowding in classrooms hinders contnuous assessment much needed to promote independent learning. Therefore, there is a need to apply some kind of automatc evaluaton to facilitate the correcton of exercises outside the classroom. | Journal of Technology and Science Education AUTOMATIC EVALUATION OF PRACTICES IN MOODLE FOR SELF LEARNING IN ENGINEERING Carles Sánchez1, Oriol Ramos1, Patricia Márquez1, Enric Mart1, Jaume Rocarias2, Debora Gil1,3 1 Comp. Vision Center, Comp. Science Dep. UAB 2 Informaton System Planifcaton UAB Serra Hunter Fellow 3 Spain csanchez@, oriolrt@, pmarquez@, enric@, , debora@ Received December 2014 Accepted January 2015 Abstract The frst years in engineering degree courses are usually made of large groups with a low teacher-student rato. Overcrowding in classrooms hinders contnuous assessment much needed to promote independent learning. Therefore, there is a need to apply some kind of automatc evaluaton to facilitate the correcton of exercises outside the classroom. We introduce here a frst experience using surveys in Moodle in order to get an automatc evaluaton of practces in our Database course. We report survey valuaton of the autonomous learning tool and preliminary statstcs assessing correlaton to an improvement in the practce exam marks. Keywords – Large groups' evaluaton, Autonomous learning, Engineering studies, Database practces, Moodle surveys. ---------- 1 INTRODUCTION Database course is a core compulsory subject in year 2 in Computer Engineering at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) from 6 ECTS. The course introduces basic contents Database (DBMS) management systems and contents are divided into two blocks: DBMS relatonal design and manipulaton of DBMS relatonal using Structure Query Language, SQL (Date 1987). One of the core skills is the ability of holding consultaton of some complexity using SQL in client-server architecture, therefore practcal exercises totalling ECTS (41%) are distributed in ECTS practce sessions and autonomous individual exercises. In previous years, students had access to an account on the database server, the DB with which
