Using open technologies for automatically creating question-and-answer sets for engineering MOOCs

Two of the main challenges faced by today's massive open online courses (MOOCs) are low completion rates and lack of equivalence with the traditional classroom-based courses. Both of these issues are somewhat related and can be attributed to the assessments which are primarily conducted online and are unsupervised. Enhancing the credibility of the assessment process can lead to higher acceptability of the MOOCs, which in turn is expected to encourage more students to complete the online courses. One way of improving the assessment is providing each online student with a unique set of questions for assignments and examinations. The MOOCs can be taken concurrently by hundreds, if not thousands of students. For such class-sizes, the manual preparation of distinct questions, especially if they include drawings (e.g., circuit schematics, block diagrams, etc.), is a very daunting proposition due to the required time and effort. To enable the automatic creation of large sets of questions-and-answers, we present a system based on open technologies. Although the system currently covers only the circuits-related courses in Electrical and Computer Engineering, the system's underlying principles are applicable to the conventional/online courses in other fields of engineering and science.