Assessment of Topography E-Learning with Exomatic

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully integrated the Bologna reform process that standardizes the Bachelor and Master programmes across Europe. This reform particularly affects the curriculum offered by the EPFL schools of civil and environmental engineering that share students during the bachelor program. Geomatics, the branch which deals with the acquisition and management of geographical data, is one of these courses to be attended by the students from both schools. As we merge classes of many students, we decided to introduce e-learning in this changing educational context. The Geodetic Engineering Laboratory launched the concept of topography e-learning during its first year class gathering more than 150 students. The idea is mainly based on a set of personalized exercises on the Web, followed by automatic corrections. This allows a substantial increase of the number of students in the course while maintaining the same level of comprehension and computational rigour. This simple concept, called Exomatic, encourages the students to be autonomous in their learning. This paper is divided into two parts: the first presents the architecture of the software developed for the Exomatic concept that notably improves the management of the exercises and of their automated corrections. The second part focuses on the assessment of Exomatic by the students and by the teachers.