Using a User-Interactive QA System to Capture Student’s Interest and Authority About Course Content

Abstract

A method for capturing the interest and authority of students about course content is proposed and implemented as a user modeling approach in a Web-based user-interactive question-answering (QA) system. An instructor has to define a topic ontology (or concept hierarchy) for the course content so that the system can generate the corresponding structure of boards to hold relevant questions. The students can interactively post questions, and browse, select, and answer others’ questions in their interested boards. The users’ log data are accumulated and organized as the users’ historical data, which are used to build the association space containing the association relations between the users’ historical data and the topic ontology. From the association space, the interest and authority of students about the questions in each board can be computed first and the interest and authority of students about each topic in the ontology can be computed based on the corresponding parameters of its offspring (sub-topics or questions). These user models (interest and authority) can be used to automatically and properly distribute relevant questions and answers to relevant students to enhance learning efficiency and help instructors design suitable teaching materials to enhance instruction efficiency.