Automatic generation of student report cards

Abstract

The Learning Analytics Report Card (LARC) is a pilot system which takes time-series data from a student's course-related activity in a Virtual Learning Environment and generates automatic textual summaries in real time. Students are able to generate reports as often as they like, and to choose which aspects of their behaviour are included in each report. As well as rating a student's scores against set standards, the generated texts make comparisons with the individual student's previous behaviour from the same course, and with the average scores of their student cohort. In addition, we carry out sentiment analysis on the student's forum posts, and generate a summary using quantifiers. We report some student reactions to initial trials of the system.