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

Abstract

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.