Self Organizing Maps (SOMS) for Organizing, Categorizing, Browsing and/or Grading Large Collections of Assignments for Massive Online Education Systems

Abstract

For courses that deal with media content, such as sound, music, photographic images, hand sketches, video, conventional techniques for automatically evaluating and grading assignments are generally ill-suited to direct evaluation of coursework submitted in media-rich form. Likewise, for courses whose subject includes programming, signal processing or other functionally-expressed designs that operate on, or are used to produce media content, conventional techniques are also ill-suited. Instead, it has been discovered that media-rich, indeed even expressive, content can be accommodated as, or as derivatives of, submissions using feature extraction and machine learning techniques. In this way, e.g., in on-line course offerings, even large numbers of students and student submissions may be accommodated in a scalable and uniform grading or scoring scheme. Likewise, large collections of coursework submissions (whether or not graded or scored) or media content more generally, may be efficiently browsed and grouped using techniques described herein.

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