A systematic literature review of learning assessment material authoring systems

Education indeed represents one of the fields in which recent technological innovations are having a bigger impact. For instance, mobile devices and cloud computing are changing the way education is delivered, especially when distance learning is considered. Artificial intelligence is contributing at tailoring education to actual learners’ progress and needs. Virtual and augmented reality are finally proving their effectiveness as complementary tools to raise learners’ engagement and strengthen practical skills acquisition. Although researchers are developing more and more systems and tools for the education community by building onto innovative technologies like those mentioned above, there is at least one process that is still regarded as particularly critical, that is content authoring. Further investigation is specifically needed for what it concerns content to be used in the assessment phases. To fill this gap, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was performed to analyse the specific domain of authoring tools for generating assessment material. Among the 398 studies published between 2015 and 2021 retrieved from the Scopus digital library, 21 papers were selected by following a predefined review protocol: the studies were first filtered to isolate only those relevant for this research, then they were scored based on a set of evaluation criteria, and finally, they were analysed in detail to extract key information. This paper presents the review of the selected papers, focusing on four research questions: (1) Which types of learners’ assessments can be created by means of existing authoring tools? (2) Which approaches are used to submit the assessments to the learners? (3) When does the authoring step actually take place? (4) What are the skills requested for the authoring? Questions were used to categorize the selected studies and discuss the most common trends in the considered context.