Darya Tarasowa, Sören Auer, Ali Khalili, and Jörg Unbehauen: In: Open Praxis The support of multilingual content becomes crucial for educational platforms due to the benefits it offers. In this paper we propose a concept that allows content authors to use the power of the crowd to create (semantically) structured multilingual educational content out of their material. To enable the collaboration of the crowd, we expand our previously developed CrowdLearn concept and WikiApp data model to support multilingual educational content. The expanded concept, CoSMEC, was evaluated with an example implementation within the web-based educational platform SlideWiki. Based on this experience, we provide solutions for the most complicated technical issues we faced during the implementation. This paper also discusses statistics which show the flow of multilingual content usage. link

Darya Tarasowa and Sören Auer: In: 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2013 ) Advantages and disadvantages of a learning assessment based on multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are a long and widely discussed issue in the scientific community. However, in practice this type of questions is very popular due to the possibility of automatic evaluation and scoring. Consequently, an important research question is to exploiting the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses of MCQs. In this work we discuss one particularly important issue of MCQs, namely methods for scoring results in the case, when the MCQ has several correct alternatives (multiple-mark questions, MMQs). We propose a general approach and mathematical model to score MMQs, that aims at recognizing guessing while at the same time resulting in a balanced score. In our approach conventional MCQs are viewed as a particular case of multiple-mark questions, thus, the formulas can be applied to tests mixing MCQs and MMQs. The rational of our approach is that scoring should be based on the guessing level of the question. Our approach can be added as an option, or even as a replacement for manual penalization. We show that our scoring method outperforms existing methods and demonstrate that with synthetic and real experiments. link

Sören Auer, Ali Khalili, and Darya Tarasowa: In: International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET) link

Darya Tarasowa, Ali Khalili, Sören Auer, and Jörg Unbehauen: In: 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2013 ) , Note: 13% acceptance rate, nominated for the best-paper award. While there is meanwhile a plethora of Learning Content Management Systems, the collaborative, community- based creation of rich e-learning content is still not sufficiently well supported. There have been some efforts to apply the Ward Cunningham's wiki paradigm to the creation of e-learning content. However, the paradigm was mainly only applied to unstructured, textual content and can not be used in SCORM-compliant systems. To address the issue we develop the CrowdLearn concept to exploit the wisdom, creativity and productivity of the crowd for the creation of rich, deep-semantically structured e-learning content. The CrowdLearn con- cept combines the wiki style for collaborative content authoring with SCORM requirements for re-usability. Therefore, it enables splitting the learning material into Learning Objects (LOs) with an adjustable level of granularity. In order to realize the CrowdLearn concept, a novel data model called WikiApp is devised. The WikiApp data model is a refinement of the traditional entity-relationship data model with further emphasis on collaborative social activities and structured content authoring. We implement and evaluate the CrowdLearn approach with SlideWiki---an educational platform dealing with presentations and questionnaires. The article also comprises results of a usability evaluation with real students. link

Darya Tarasowa, Ali Khalili, and Sören Auer: In: Proceedings of the KESW 2012 A special activity, that became possible nowadays, is the collaborative e-learning and collaborative engineering of learning materials. Such an opportunity is available in educational systems, based on the wiki paradigm. However, Ward Cunningham's wiki paradigm was mainly only applied to unstructured, textual content thus limiting the content structuring, re-purposing and reuse. Some steps in this direction are made by Semantic Web technologies and their combination with the wiki paradigm. In many potential usage scenarios, however, the(semi-)structured educational content (e.g. presentations, questionnaires, diagrams, etc.) should be managed and the collaboration of large user communities around such content should be effectively facilitated. We present the CrowdLearn concept for collaborative engineering of the semantically structured learning objects as well as a model-driven approach to generate the wiki-like application operating in the spirit of CrowdLearn. We implement and evaluate the approach with Slidewiki - an educational platform mainly dealing with slide presentations. The article also comprises a usability evaluation with real students. link

Ali Khalili, Sören Auer, Darya Tarasowa, and Ivan Ermilov: In: Proceedings of the EKAW 2012 , Note: 16% acceptance rate, nominated for the best-paper award. Presentations play a crucial role in knowledge management within organizations, in particular to facilitate organizational learning and innovation. Much of the corporate strategy, direction and accumulated knowledge within organizations is encapsulated in presentations. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of current presentation tools for semi-structured knowledge representation and sharing within organizations. We address challenges such as collaborative creation of presentations, tracking changes within them, sharing and reusing existing presentations. Then we present SlideWiki as a crowd-sourcing platform for the elicitation and sharing of corporate knowledge using presentations. With SlideWiki users can author, collaborate and arrange slides in organizational presentations by employing Web 2.0 strategies. Presentations can be organized hierarchically, so as to structure them reasonably according to their content. According to the wiki paradigm, all content in SlideWiki (i.e. slides, decks, themes, diagrams) are versioned and users can fork and merge presentations the same way as modern social coding platforms allow. Moreover, SlideWiki supports social networking activities such as following and discussing presentations for effective knowledge management. The article also comprises an evaluation of our SlideWiki implementation involving real users link