Learning from peers: motivating students through reputation systems Marco Temperini and Andrea Sterbini Sapienza University of Rome, Via Salaria 113, Rome, Italy marte@dis.uniroma1.it , sterbini@di.uniroma1.it Abstract Our on-line students, being mainly busy worker- students, study almost alone. To improve their interaction we use asynchronous tools (Wiki or forums), but we notice that interaction becomes high mainly when the discussion is focused on a task to be graded for the exam or when the teacher/tutor is very active in the community. We present SOCIALX, our exercise sharing tool, an application to e-learning of a simple reputation system to increase the student motivation and interaction, and to let them learning from each other, either by reusing other's solutions or by correcting other's mistakes. Moreover, students gain reputation from others reusing their solutions. In this we want to engage students in learning activities at the highest cognitive levels of the Bloom taxonomy [1]. 1. Introduction We present an application to e-learning of basic reputation system techniques, developed with the aims of increasing the motivation and level of interaction among students, and helping the students to learn from each other, such that each one can reuse (at different levels) a solution proposed by another, and possibly spot some mistakes found there. We have implemented SOCIALX, an exercise sharing tool where students gain reputation in front of the teacher and (especially) of the other students by submitting solutions to exercises and by collecting endorsements by other students inspired to reused solutions. Our main goals are: •to increase the motivation in doing exercises and activities •to increase the collaboration and sharing •to increase critical thinking (while analysing other's solutions and looking for errors) •and thus engage students in Learning Objectives at the highest conceptual levels of the Bloom taxonomy. 2. The “SOCIALX” system The SOCIALX system allows three types of users: •teachers create courses, add exercises to topics of their courses and “endorse” a solution by stating if it's correct or wrong, •the administrator enables new teachers, •students browse courses, exercises and solutions and add votes and new solutions, 3. Exercises and solutions Exercises are associated to topics inside one of the courses of a teacher. E.g. The course “Linguaggi per il Web” (Web languages) contains 50 exercises on the topics: •XML (6 exercises) •XHTML (11 exercises) •CSS (10 exercises) •XHTML-CSS (6 exercises) •CGI (4 exercises) •PHP (10 exercises) •PHP-MySQL (3 exercises) An exercise is added to the system by uploading a file containing all the material needed to describe and solve it (in the simplest case, a PDF file describing the problem, or a compressed archive containing all the required files), and associating the exercise to a specific course and topic. A student can try to solve an exercise from scratch or can download and examine other's students solutions and get inspiration from them, and later add his/her new solution. When a new solution is added the student should state what is the level of reuse of the other solutions (in a range going from “simple inspiration” to “almost total reuse”). In doing this s/he increase the reputation of the author of the reused solution. A student can vote for a solution that he likes/dislikes with a mark ranging from 0 (worst) to 10 (best), thus improving/reducing the other's reputation. The teacher can mark a solution as “good” (i.e. correct), so that the author will gain reputation from its reuse, or “bad” (i.e. incorrect), so that other students will gain International Symposium on Applications and the Internet 978-0-7695-3297-4/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/SAINT.2008.107 305