Learning from Peers: Motivating Students through Reputation Systems

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.