Abstract:

SMILE (http://www.smileglobal.net/) is an inquiry-based peer-to-peer system that allows students to pose and answer questions in classroom settings. The primary learning design consists of sessions of question posing and question answering for a topic selected by the teacher. Students use their laptops, tablets or mobile phones to post multiple-choice questions on a topic of interest. The questions can include images taken using device’s camera. Once the questions have been posed by students, other students can answer and rate the questions posed by their colleagues. This approach is interesting because there is a well-known relationship between problem posing and better problem solving in teachers and students alike. Problem posing is also known to help in development of meta-cognition and active learning, and increases students’ perceived interest in the subject matter. Therefore, a system like SMILE is expected to foster meta-cognition and active learning, and its use should lead to better motivation and problem solving abilities in students. At a more abstract level, SMILE can also be viewed as a crowd-sourcing system where the contributors are mostly student peers. However, unlike other well-known crowd-sourcing systems like Wikipedia, SMILE currently lacks the quality assurance workflows that implement various editorial cycles to ensure the quality of the crowd-sourced content. In order to address this critical gap, rather than re-inventing the wheel, this paper considers the approach of integrating SMILE with Assessment Wiki. Assessment Wiki is a system for crowd-sourcing multiple-choice questions. Assessment Wiki is based on the MediaWiki platform and uses the IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) Standard as its internal format for assessments. Assessment Wiki uses MediaWiki’s editing, control (e.g. versioning) and community features (e.g., talk pages, profiles, access levels) to enact the quality assurance workflows for crowd-sourced assessments. In addition, using Assessment Wiki provides two advantages. First, each posed question is tied explicitly to learning outcomes in a formal curriculum, and secondly IMS QTI allows questions to be exchanged with major learning management systems like Moodle. A middle-ware providing a bi-directional interface between SMILE and Assessment Wiki has been constructed. The middle-ware allows questions from SMILE to be fed into the editorial cycle of Assessment Wiki. Similarly, a variety of questions on various topics already available in Assessment Wiki can be injected into the SMILE system as well. This middle-ware allows each system to run independently, but offers the flexibility of using each other’s services.

Keywords:

Peer-to-peer learning, assessment, crowd-sourcing.