Occasional Thoughts on Educational Technology and Life by Judy Brophy

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Machine Scored Discussion Boards

This started out as a joke but the more I think about it the more I like it.

What every learning management system needs is an auto-scored discussion board, a discussion where the computer scores student entries.

This would be useful to instructors who:
- want students to post a response to a question
- and then post a reply to another student,
- who want the posts to have a point value,
- but who don’t want to spend time scoring responses.

 (and trust me, there is a lot of navigating work to get posts into a format that you can see what you need to see to grade them.)

So why not have the Learning Management System automatically score x points for posting and x points for replying.


This would make it possible to have a low stakes assignment that does not take up excessive time grading.  The instructor could still read the posts and comment as they feel is appropriate. They can spend time reading students’ thoughts and engaging them in conversation, not grading.