Intelligent Interfaces for Open Social Student Modeling

In this talk I will introduce the emerging technology of Open Social Student Modeling (OSSM) and review several projects performed in our research lab to investigate the potential of OSSM. OSSM is a recent extension of Open Student Modeling (OSM), a popular technology in the area of personalized learning systems. While in traditional personalized systems, student models were hidden "under the hood" and used to personalize the educational process; open student modeling introduced the ability to view and modify the state of students' own knowledge to support reflection, self-organized learning, and system transparency. Open Social Student Modeling takes this idea one step further by allowing students to explore each other's models or an aggregated model of the class. The idea to make OSM social was originally suggested and explored by Bull [1; 2]. Over the last few years, our team explored several approaches to present OSSM in a highly visual form and evaluated these approaches in a sequence of classroom and lab studies. I will present a summary of this work introducing such systems as QuizMap [3], Progressor [4], and Mastery Grids [5] and reviewing most interesting research evidence collected by the studies.