IMPLEMENTATION OF FEEDBACK MECHANISMS IN LEARNING SETTINGS USING A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY SYSTEM

This work introduces the design and development steps, together with first experimentations of a set of services for the creation of on-line surveys, questionnaires, exams and self-assessment tests within an e-learning application. The application is not a traditional Learning Management System (LMS), but it is based on the metaphor of virtual learning communities.
The system, called “OnLine Communities”, is a dynamic web application used as platform for blended learning activities by the Faculty of Economics of the University of Trento.
The functionalities added to the platform are contextualized into virtual communities, where educational and social (blogs, wikis, chat, videoconference etc) activities take place. This allow us to create, submit and analyze questionnaires within and/or outside the boundaries of a community, allowing members of the community, people from the outside of the community but inside the system, or even people from outside the system to use questionnaires and self-assessment tools. Furthermore, the system allows to manage libraries of queries organized by the teacher / administrator of the community according to topics and levels of difficulty, in order to produce tests and generate self-assessment sessions on behalf of students.
In the paper we will present these functionalities and will highlight one of these services, precisely the one dedicated to self-assessment. In our system, self-assessment testing has indeed a double nature:
a) they are useful to students for checking their own level of preparation;
b) they are useful to lecturers as an indicator of the level of preparation reached by the students.
The opportunity to generate self-assessment tests in a random way starting from libraries of questions enables the student to check his/her own learning path and to weigh up its efficiency along a given period of time, with the opportunity to obtains personalized suggestions concerning the results attained. The novelty respect to the many other tools available on the market stays in the the metaphor used within the system, in order to favour cooperative processes. This metaphor is the learning community, that enables the person in charge of the responsibility for education (usually the teacher) to analyze tests’ results made by the participants of each community in an aggregate way. In this way, the teacher will be able to adapt his/her own teaching activities and methods according to the training gaps highlighted within each associated community as a virtual space of a course.
In order to encourage the use of the system within the whole educational process, and not limiting the use of the service to the period of the final exams only, the possibility has been foreseen for each participant to share his/her own test results, comparing them with the other members of the community, and even offering real “challenges”, thus transforming passive and “solitary” learning into something much more stimulating and “social”.
The work is organized as follows:
• in the introduction we will present the context of our application
• in section one we will offer short information on the nature of On Line Communities
• in sections two and tree we will discuss in detail the modality of the self-assessment functions added to our platform, both from the point of view of the student and the teacher.