On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:01 PM, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
In short, PeerWise is an automated self-study,
low-stakes assessment
system where both questions and answers are edited and reviewed by
anyone (with access; in practice this usually means anyone enrolled in
a course or major at an institution) very similarly to textual content
in a wiki. It is already being used successfully at hundreds of higher
education and other institutions. But sadly it's closed source. I
have since 2009 been trying to encourage the Foundation to build an
open source version of such a system.
Is there anyone else interested in this?
@James: I'm intrigued by this system, and I've talked to a Wikipedian in
Auckland who used it and liked it. However, I think blanking the database
at the beginning of each course is a big mistake, as is limiting it to a
small class audience. I imagine building a similar system that is
monolithic (a single database for all topics), accepts contributions from
the general public, accumulates over time like Wikipedia, and is moderated
by experienced users using tags and/or a hierarchy. A sort of "Wikipedia of
assessment" if you will. In principle it's even possible to incorporate
short answer and essay questions by leveraging some mixture of machine
learning and peer review - positive and negative examples could then be
highlighted with comments to help provide feedback to others.
I'm equipped to prototype a system like this and it would mesh well with my
research, but I'd like to know your thoughts, as well as if there are other
interested parties you might recruit. Let me know. :-)
--
Derrick Coetzee
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dcoetzee/