Computer-assisted evaluation of CSCL chat conversations

Abstract

Although instant messaging is a very popular tool for collaboration and it has been used for a wide variety of CSCL tasks, there are only a few applications for assisting the tutors in evaluating the conversations of the students. Due to the difficulty of this task, chat is seldom used in a formal education context. In order to tackle this problem, several applications were developed which assist the tutors when evaluating chat conversations. This paper presents a comparison of the evaluation results when using these applications on a set of three multi-user chat sessions.