Open Mentor

Open Mentor is a learning support tool for tutors in further and higher education, which assists them through analysing and then providing reflective comments on their assessment and feedback of student assignments. We found that tutors use different types of questions in different ways, both to stimulate reflection, and to point out, in a supportive way, that there are problems with parts of an essay. These results showed that about half of Bales's interaction categories strongly correlated with grade of assessment in different ways, while others were rarely used in feedback to learners. Open Mentor sets this framework on an open source foundation (http://openmentor.comp.rgu.ac.uk). It is implemented in Java and MySQL. Open Mentor reads and opens assignments written in Microsoft Word, to extract the tutor comments. The JCharts graphing component is then used to provide interactive views onto the tutors' comments, showing the difference between actual and ideal comment distributions.   [More]

Partners

• Institute of Educational Technology, Open University

Funding

• JISC, Open University

Research Team

• Stuart Watt (PI)
• Colin Beagrie
• Ian Craw
• Jan Holt

Related Projects

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• Sentiment Analysis from Textual Data
• SmartWeb — a centre of excellence for intelligent Web technologies
• WebCluster — mediated access to the web

Posters

• Technology-Enhanced Assessment

Publications

McKillop, C., Watt, S. N. K. (2007). 'Assessment Island': the making of an interactive quest to understand and learn from assessment. ED­MEDIA 2007

Pittaway, M., Whitelock, D. & Watt, S. (2007) 'Open Comment: An open source formative assessment feedback and guidance tool for History students'. The Curriculum, Teaching & Student Support Conference, The Open University, Milton Keynes, 1-2 May 2007.

Watt, S. N. K. (2007). Re-imagining the Cybernetic Frame of Higher Education. 5th International Conference on Imagination and Education.

Watt, S. N. K., Draper, S. W., McKillop, C., Whitelock, D. M. (2007). Symposium: e-Assessment: Instructivist Wolves in Constructivist Sheep's Clothing?. Computer Assisted Learning 2007.

Whitelock, D. M., Pittaway, M., Watt, S. N. K. (2007). Open Comment: An open source formative assessment feedback and guidance tool for History students. Open University Curriculum, Teaching and Student Support Conference

Whitelock, D. M., Watt, S. N. K. (2007). e­Assessment: how can we support tutors with their marking of electronically submitted assignments. ad­lib: Journal for Continuing Liberal Adult Education. 7-8.

Whitelock, D. M., Watt, S. N. K. (2007). Open Mentor: supporting tutors with their feedback to students. Computer Assisted Assessment 2007.

Whitelock, D. M., Watt, S. N. K. (2006). Open Mentor: opening tutors eyes to the written support given to students on their assignments. JISC Conference 2006.

Whitelock, D., Watt, S., Moreale, E. and Raw, Y. (2002) Exploring Essay Marking Tools for Quality Assurance: The tip of the iceberg? International Conference on Computer Based Testing and the Internet: Building Guidelines for Best Practice. June 2002, Winchester. p39

Watt, S. N. K., Simpson, C., McKillop, C., & Nunn, V. (2002). Electronic course surveys: does automating feedback and reporting give better results?. In Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, Vol 27(4), page(s) 325-337

Whitelock, D. M., Watt, S. N. K., Moreale, E., & Raw, Y. (2002). What measures do we need to build an electronic monitoring tool for postgraduate tutor marked assignments?. 6th International Computer Assisted Assessment (CAA) Conference, Loughborough, UK, on 9th and 10th of July.

Whitelock, D., Raw, Y., Watt, S. and Moreale, E. (2002) Improving Feedback to Tutors: Constructing an electronic monitoring system. ALT-C2002, 9th International Conference of the Association for Learning Technology. 9th-11th September 2002, Sunderland. p1 ÓAssociation for Learning Technology.

Collins, T. D., Mulholland, P., & Watt, S. N. K. (2001). Using genre to support active participation in learning communities. European Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (Euro-CSCL'2001), Maastricht, The Netherlands