Derrick, it looks like Tim Hunt, one of the Moodle core developers, is planning to try to get something similar going for Moodle during this year's Google Summer of Code: http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Projects_for_new_developers#Self-assessment_activ...
Moodle has 65 million unique users per year, which sounds impressive compared to Wikiversity's roughly 800,000 unique visitors per month (Comscore January 2010 adjusted by page views) but it's really not, because almost all Moodle users are in very structured course situations where instructors are unlikely to add non-core modules such as a question bank. So getting an extension going for Mediawiki and opening up a global shared question bank on Wikiversity would be *far* superior, and a much larger good.
Please do go for it! Use Moodle's GIFT question format for interoperability.
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 12:44 AM, Derrick Coetzee dc@moonflare.com wrote:
On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:01 PM, James Salsman jsalsman@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/