In early September, the system was opened to general use by 230 students in an introductory psychology course that had the usual complement of weekly lectures, group discussions, midterm quizzes and final exams. Students used the system for about two months and participation in A$kAn$ accounted for eight per cent of the final grade.

SETTLING IN

Students registered with the system using an existing email address and occupied a slot in one of 10 virtual cities. Each city was represented as a 5 x 5 matrix with 25 cells. Each student chose a nickname and an icon to be associated with the student questions and answers. Students could change their appearance, nickname or location; most of them quickly settled in one of 10 cities, adopting a personal nickname and an icon.

ENGAGING, EFFECTIVE and SCALABLE

A$kAn$ is database driven and opens up the possibility of many kinds of reuse including course redesign. A$kAn$ is being generalized to multiple courses and multiple teachers within each course who are assigned to one or more course content domains. Team based activity, chat and other features are also in development. The goal is to make the system engaging, effective and scalable; both from the technical as well as the cognitive perspective.

DISTINCTIVE ACCOMPLISHMENT

A few outstanding students, who consistently produced high quality questions and answers, were given special recognition during the last lecture session of the term. It is interesting to note that while these students did well on traditional evaluations, there were several students who excelled on exams but the quality of their questions and answers were not outstanding. This suggests that the kind of learning and accomplishment exhibited on the A$kAn$ is distinctive from that measured by traditional evaluations.

The above is a summary of the article contributed by Dr N. Sriram. You can download the complete article.