Semantic Web technologies for generating feedback in online assessment environments

Feedback is an important component of assessment in learning environments, because it constitutes a new learning opportunity which is not usually available in most eLearning systems. Feedback allows students to know their learning flaws and helps teachers to design learning contents adapted to the needs of the students. Semantic Web technologies have been applied in recent years with different purposes in Education, but their applications for generating useful feedback have not been researched enough so far. In this paper we present an approach for generating feedback to open questions in assessment tests, by making use of ontologies and semantic annotations. The feedback is generated by obtaining the semantic similarity between the annotations associated with both questions and students' answers. The method has been implemented as an extension of our online assessment platform. Its application in a real course is also presented and discussed here. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.