Open Comment Project led by Denise Whitelock*

Team Members

Stuart Watt**, Mark Pittaway*, Robert Harding, Clive Baldwin*

* The Open University, ** The Robert Gordon University

Open Comment is an open source text recognition question type for Moodle. The
way it handles the free text entry from students is to restrict the types of questions
that can be employed into three major categories which are:

1. The identification of similarities and differences between key concepts.
2. The analysis of numerical data which would lead to inferencing in a given
 domain
3. The comprehension of a set text

This in effect means that there is an underlying model of causal explanation which
is central to the feedback approach employed in Open Comment. It is currently being
used for History and Philosophy questions from the Arts Faculty Foundation Course at the Open University. Here are some example questions which are in development.

Pedagogical Driver

The pedagogical rationale for this development was to engage students in a series of electronic formative assessment tasks that would provide more free text entry with automatic feedback. This would promote a more challenging experience for the students than just checking their learning for revision purposes and promote a more personalised learning environment for self reflection than was provided by multiple choice questions.

More information available at the OpenComment project website