An issue facing online education is students getting
feedback on assignments and tests from instructors in a timely manner. The
crowdsourcing system Caesar is providing a solution for some students at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT).
“The students in our programming courses write a lot of
code and it takes a long time for a small staff of human graders to read and
grade,” said MIT professor Rob Miller, who developed Caesar through the MIT
computer science and artificial intelligence lab, in an article for eCampusNews.
“The old way, it might take a few weeks to get feedback about what they’d written,
and in that time they’ve written more programs—often repeating the same
mistakes over and over.”
Caesar prioritizes submitted assignments and sends them
to teaching assistants, course alumni, and computer-science students for
review. Multiple reviewers are sent the assignments and all are able to offer
comments and advice on the work, generally within three days and well before
students have finished their next assignment.
The system is being expanded to other MIT programming
courses and could be adopted by edX, the massive open online course platform
founded by MIT and Harvard University. Miller also believes Caesar will work
for more than just computer programming classes.
“The essential idea of crowdsourced review—dividing
student work into smaller pieces and distributing those pieces to a mixed crowd
of reviewers who comment on and discuss them—is likely to be applicable to many
kinds of courses, including liberal arts, business, and social sciences, not
just technical [courses],” he said.