Collaborative projects and self evaluation within a social reputation-based exercise-sharing system

We present the design issues and motivations of an enhanced version of the web-based system SOCIALX, supporting collaborative and social aspects of learning. This web application allows to share solutions to exercises and development of project(possibly group-) work, through the management of a reputation system. With the aim of enhancing collaboration and to help students working on exercises, we introduce contextual FAQs and micro-forums and a currency-based concretization of the perceived usefulness of other's answers. The tokens exchanged are used also to help the teacher/tutor in choosing the best question/answer pairs to be promoted to the FAQ. To introduce group responsibilities, peer-pressure and self-evaluation we define group-based projects with self/peer-evaluated phases. The different phases of a project are given to different groups, so that the produced deliverables are both self-evaluated when they are submitted and peer-evaluated by the group working on the next phase. The system is its last stages of development and will be tested with real students in the next academic year.