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case, the question ought to be approved by an instructor, who also assigns points to it
according to his/her judgement. When the question appears open, a period to provide
answers starts. That time period can be definite or indefinite, depending on parameters
used at the creation time. And the answers can be either individual or collective. While
open, any answer uploaded can be edited or corrected by its authors, unless the answer
has already received an evaluation by the instructors. In this case, the particular answer
is closed (it remains visible) and becomes inmutable.
Points awarded to a question or to an answer serve two purposes simultaneously.
First, to classify questions and answer, that is, using the points as a measure of rele-
vance/importance of that item. Indeed, the plugin can display a thread of answers not
by chronological order, but by relevance or ranking order. Second, points awarded to a
question or an answer are meant to be distributed among its authors, using rules defined
elsewhere. Consequently, this plugin interacts with a generic ranking plugin, one that
collects the points assigned to tasks in any other plugin, sorts the scores by user (or
subgroup) and, ultimately, builds a reputation for every user in the group.
Visibility of questions and answers is under direct control of the instructors, as a
primary mechanism to restrict inaccurate, vague or misleading threads of discussion.
As an illustration, Figure 1 shows the appearance of the questions and answers plugin.
3.2 Challenges
Challenges are in SocialWire synonymous of strategic games. More clearly, a challenge
is in our view any proposed activity asking for hints, ideas, full solutions or suggestions
to a complex problem, one with a nontrivial or non-unique answer. Without loss of gen-
erality, when we identify challenges with strategic games, we are taking the assumption
that challenges are always cooperation (and not competitive) games, i.e., the goal of
a challenge is to achieve collectively an approximate solution to a difficult question.
Hence, there are not incentives for confusing, misguide or take profit from other par-
ticipants.
1
As before, a challenge can receive answers during a definite or an indefinite
time period, as the authors decided. But, being intrinsically open, challenges are graded
differently than ordinary questions. Here, the answers do not receive points while the
challenge is open to new contributions. Instead, after the challenge has been closed,
two possibilities exist. One option is that the instructors distribute points between the
different answers, according to their quality, completeness or any sound criterion. Al-
ternatively, the answers (possibly curated of filtrated by the instructors) can enter a poll,
whereby the students themselves vote for the closest to solve the challenge. Then, points
are awarded proportionally to the votes collected by each answer. The context and topic
of the challenge determines which of the two options suits better.
Clearly, this plugin interacts closely with the ranking plugin, too. See Figure 2 for a
screenshot of an example challenge.
1
Pure competition, albeit not in the most general form, can be achieved with the questions
and answers plugin, simply closing the question as soon as the first correct answer has been
provided.
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