An Exploratory study on authorship veri cation and learning assessment in online education systems

Abstract

Many in class and distance courses off ered these days involve the submission of assignments online. These assignments are meant to be assessed to give students timely feedback. However, ensuring that the student who is enrolled in the course is the same who is submitting the assignment work has been a challenge. Since the submitted assignments are in a formal structure and contain some features that can be extracted and accessed automatically, there can be measures like stylometry to study the real author of the submitted work. Once, author verifi cation is done, it is required to assess the verifi ed documents from diff erent aspects. In this research, two main objectives are being covered in order to see how much actual learning is happening. Firstly, whether the student is actually participating in the course activities as that reflects how comfortable student is with the course. Secondly, how much the student can actually learn in such environments like that of distance learning. With the approach of matching n grams and global weight of terms used in the submissions, we comment on the understanding of a course by the student. Such assessments can help instructor to predict over all learning for the course and what alterations can be made to have eff ective outcome. A correlation on learning scores and instructor grades is done to show whether such learning measuring techniques can be used to quantify students' learning as a whole.