Visualization of Knowledge Map based on STACK Answer Data

With the development of e-learning, more learning management systems(LMS) are used to support both self-study courses and on-campus courses. Some of them are open-source platform, which allows the tutors or the course designers to create their own courses freely. And most of them are equipped with automatic scoring system to give students instant feedback after submitting answers.

One typical case is one of the most popular LMS called Moodle, and the scoring system running on it named STACK, which is specialized for mathematics. This system uses an answer analyzing mechanism called Potential Response Tree(PRT) to predict the answers students may reach and give specific feedback after test.

However, it is found that feedbacks given by those automatic systems are always too pale and insufficient to help the students to catch the knowledge points they really lack during their study. To solve this problem, we try to set a knowledge map for the course and link it to the questions and answers of tests. With this solution, the learner can get a more direct recognition of his/her knowledge acquisition level and the whole construction of the course he takes.

This research completed a plugin running on Moodle, collaborating with the scoring system STACK. It allows tutors to set up the knowledge map for this course, and give graphic feedback after the students take their test.