Peer assessment and knowledge discovering in a community of learners

Thanks to the exponential growth of the Internet, Distance Education is becoming more and more strategic in many fields of daily life. Its main advantage is that students can learn through appropriate web platforms that allow them to take advantage of multimedia and interactive teaching materials, without constraints neither of time nor of space. Today, in fact, the Internet offers many platforms suitable for this purpose, such as Moodle, ATutor and others. Coursera is another example of a platform that offers different courses to thousands of enrolled students. This approach to learning is, however, posing new problems such as that of the assessment of the learning status of the learner in the case where there were thousands of students following a course, as is in Massive On-line Courses (MOOC). The Peer Assessment can therefore be a solution to this problem: evaluation takes place between peers, creating a dynamic in the community of learners that evolves autonomously. In this article, we present a first step towards this direction through a peer assessment mechanism led by the teacher who intervenes by evaluating a very small part of the students. Through a mechanism based on machine learning, and in particular on a modified form of K-NN, given the teacher’s grades, the system should converge towards an evaluation that is as similar as possible to the one that the teacher would have given. An experiment is presented with encouraging results.