SocialX: An Improved Reputation Based Support to Social Collaborative Learning through Exercise Sharing and Project Teamwork

SocialX is a web application supporting social-collaborative and cooperative aspects of e-learning, such as sharing and reuse of (solutions to) single exercises, and development of projects by group-work and social exchange. Such aspects are supported in the framework of a reputation system, in which learners participate. We describe design and motivational issues of the system, show implementation details and describe a small-scale experimentation that helped evaluating the effectiveness of the system as well as the best lines for further development. In the system, learner’s reputation is computed, presented and maintained during her/his interactions with the system. The algorithm to compute reputation can be configured by the teacher, by tuning weights associated to various aspects of the interactions. To enhance collaboration on exercises, we support contextual (to the exercise) micro-forum and FAQs, together with a currency-based concretization of the perceived usefulness of questions/answers. Group responsibilities, peer-assessment and self-evaluation are supported by group-based projects with self/peer-evaluated phases: Different stages of a project are assigned to different groups; a stage-deliverable is both self-evaluated (at submission) and peer-evaluated (by the group receiving it for the next stage). This paper is an extension of the original version, published on the International Journal of Information Systems and Social Change: mainly two sections were added, describing the latest improvements and some experimentation