Enabling automatic just-in-time evaluation of in-class discussions in on-line collaborative learning practices

Learning by discussion when applied to on-line collaborative learning settings can provide significant benefits for students in education in general. Indeed, the discussion process plays an important social task in collaborative learning practices. Participants can discuss about the activity being p...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Caballé Llobet, Santiago, Lapedriza Garcia, Àgata, Masip Rodó, David, Xhafa Xhafa, Fatos|||0000-0001-6569-5497, Abraham, Ajith
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2009
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/119813
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/119813
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Web-based instruction
Groupware (Computer software)
Machine learning
Collaborative learning
Knowledge discovery
Automatic evaluation
Ensenyament virtual
Programaris de grup
Aprenentatge automàtic
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial::Aprenentatge automàtic
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Ensenyament i aprenentatge::TIC's aplicades a l'educació
Descripción
Sumario:Learning by discussion when applied to on-line collaborative learning settings can provide significant benefits for students in education in general. Indeed, the discussion process plays an important social task in collaborative learning practices. Participants can discuss about the activity being performed, collaborate with each other through the exchange of ideas that may arise, propose new resolution mechanisms, justify and refine their own contributions, and as a result, acquire new knowledge. Considering these benefits, current educational organizations incorporate on-line discussions into web-based courses as part of the very rationale of their pedagogical models. However, in-class collaborative assignments are usually greatly participated and contributed, which makes the monitoring and assessment tasks by tutors and moderators time-consuming, tedious and error-prone. Specially hard if not impossible by human tutors is to manually deal with the sequences of hundreds of contributions making up the discussion threads and the relations between these contributions. Consequently, tutoring tasks during on-line discussions usually restrict to offer evaluation results of the contributing effort and quality after the collaborative learning activity takes place and thus neglect the essential issue of constantly considering the process of knowledge building while it is still being performed. In this paper, we propose a multidimensional model based on data analysis from online collaborative discussion interactions that provides a first step towards an automatic evaluation in just-in-time fashion. The context of this study is a real on-line discussion experience that took place at the Open University of Catalonia.