LTfLL NEWSLETTER
Enter your email address to subscribe to the newsletter.5.1 – The LTfLL Chat & Forum Analysis and Feedback System 'PolyCAFe'
Download: LTfLL-Service-Description
Problem: Educational institutions have widely embraced the use of internet, web technologies and its collaborative environments to supplement standard learning practices. Learners’ interactions show their (individual and group) knowledge regarding the course materials as well as their capacity to apply this knowledge. However, what happens in these interactions is often beyond the control of the teachers, who mainly focus on the results of the collaboration processes. More involvement to assess individual contributions, to moderate or to provide relevant feedback concerning the quality of these web interactions with regards to both content and collaboration appears to be time-consuming and comes with a high cognitive load.
Solution: C&F-AFS supports tutors and learners in the analysis of the collaboration among learners and of their individual activities in virtual teams: It produces various kinds of information about discussions in chats and forums, both quantitative and qualitative, such as metrics (e.g. the relative importance of each utterance, learner grades both globally and for particular features like the involvement in the collaboration, the social effect of what they said, etc.), and content analysis results (such as the coverage of the key concepts supposed to be discussed and the discourse threads). C&F-AFS also provides visual feedback about the interactions and the social participation. The visualization of the conversation and forum is interactive, that means the learners and tutors may explore different perspectives and discussion threads, they may view implicit links discovered by the system between utterances or posts, they may see the threading of using different concepts.
Story: At the NLP course, we use a forum and a chat system to collaborate with our classmates. Moreover, the evaluation of these activities constitutes an important part of the final grade for each student. Dr. Smith starts discussion topics on the forum after each course. The tutors have to moderate and solve possible conflicts by offering explanations. In addition, the teacher gives us topics to discuss in small groups using the chat system.
As preparation for a chat, the tutors group us in small teams of 4-7 participants, each of us being assigned a topic to study and then support in debates. I read the most interesting materials about that topic in order to understand the subject in detail. During the discussions, my peers present other points of view, we debate and inter-animate, all of these improving my own and the others’ understanding of the domain. After ending a chat session, the C&F-AFS provides feedback and preliminary scores both for myself and for my group as a whole.
When I'm using C&F-AFS for a forum it shows me threads and/or posts that are related to a concept, it recommends peer-learners that have a good understanding of particular topics and it offers preliminary feedback about my activities for self-reflection.
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Key functionalities (indicate what is ready/available)
Preparation Configure the course (select language & domain) Provide additional configuration parameters Upload grading and feedback instructions Configure (forum & chat) assignments Assign tutors to chat groups and forums Create student groups (for chat - introduce roles, key concepts and associated features to be discussed)
Learner discussion with C&F-AFS Select assignment Upload chat log Upload forum threads database Ask for analysis of a chat Ask for analysis of posts in discussion forum Search in forum by concept(s) Return automatic textual feedback containing data about the discussion as a whole, about each utterance or post and about each learner Return automatic graphical feedback (graphical visualization of the discussion) Explore the graphical visualization of the discussion Return grading proposal Request the final feedback from the tutor
Assess learners contribution with C&F-AFS Request forum view report with statistics Explore the graphical visualization of the discussion Edit the automatic feedback and grading Mark assignment as completed Save info about automatic feedback errors Request course stats and reports |
Required techniques and data: Instant messaging system Discussion forums NLP pipe (with modules adapted to the considered language) Discourse analysis Domain ontology or LSA Lexical ontology (WordNet) Social Network Analysis Feedback database
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Validation Our validation goals are to investigate the extent to which: - Learners get useful feedback immediately after they finish a chat discussion and just-in-time for forums - C&F-AFS offers a graphical visualization that improves the understanding of the conversations - The time needed to provide final feedback and grading is reduced - The quality of the feedback increases resulting from analyzing collaborative chat sessions and discussion forums - It is easier to maintain consistency of feedback between different tutors - The system offers formative feedback to adapt and improve the course by harvesting the large volume of data produced by the learners - Using C&F-AFS mediated collaboration improves the learning outcomes of the learners
The feedback service for chat conversations will be validated during the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) course, running for 14 weeks in the first semester (ends in February 2010) at the Computer Science Department, “Politehnica” University of Bucharest, . The validation will involve the following participants: - 8 undergraduate students, year 4 (senior year); - 4 tutors / teaching assistants for the HCI course and 1 professor for the HCI course;
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