MUP/PLE lecture series
This event took place on Tuesday 07 June 2011 at 14:00

Traian Rebedea “Politehnica” University of Bucharest

In most educational scenarios, the learners that use online discussions such as instant messaging and discussion forums never receive feedback for their conversations, especially due to the fact that such an analysis is very difficult and time consuming for tutors. This is the main problem that PolyCAFe is addressing by providing automatic feedback to learners and by supporting tutors in the analysis of their students’ multi-party online discussions.

PolyCAFe 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), and content analysis results (such as the coverage of the key concepts to be discussed and the discourse threads). PolyCAFe also provides visual feedback about the interactions and the social participation. The visualization of the conversations 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 and they may see the threading of using different concepts.