Sonia Mandin

Helping Students Understand Courses through Written Syntheses: An LSA-Based Online Advisor

In a life-long learning context, learners have to perform a lot of writing-based activities, like doc¬ument analysis, that are seldom assessed by teachers or tutors because this assessment is time-consuming. We introduce a service, Pensum, integrated in a PLE that helps students to understand a course content through writing a synthesis, as well as teachers and tutors to manage this activity. Based on natural language processing techniques, Pensum proposes just-in-time and reflexive feedback on a complex writing task.

Basing Learner Modelling on an Ontology of Knowledge and Skills

The aim of the research described in this paper is to construct learner skill profiles. The profiles represent the proficiency in knowledge described by an ontology. For this, we identify three needs: a need for a knowledge reference system that organizes knowledge, for identification of the learner knowledge used in the exercises and for a diagnosis model of knowledge. We describe how we propose to respond to each need. In particular, we propose the calculation of three types of mastery values for the knowledge. The diagnosis model we suggest takes these assessments into account in order to make a profile of each learner.