The idea of integrating CQA system Askalot into edX was emerged at CSCW'15W, where the team mentor Ivan Srba was presenting Askalot. He met there Joseph J. Wiliams from Harvard University and after a discussion they agreed that Askalot would be a great replacement for discussion system currently used in edX. Afterwards the team AskEd was formed. It consists of six students and their mentor Ivan Srba. Their goal is to integrate Askalot into edX system.
Askalot is a community question answering system that was developed by team naRuby as a part of their team project in years 2013/2014, and it is currently used at Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies at Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. This project also won the TP CUP award.
Community question answering systems (CQA) are a popular part of the Web. Among the well-known systems belong Yahoo! Answers, Wiki Answers and Stack Overflow. Everyone, who has problems or unanswered questions can use these systems to ask new question, and let the community to find the answer. Other users help to choose the best answer by voting on the answers and or can post a new answer if no good answer is present. Once the user, who has asked the question, gets satisfying answer, he/she can mark it as accepted. This provides other incomming users with additional information about the correct answer to that particular question. As the problems in human daily life repeat it is much easier to find the answers to the most common questions thanks to CQA systems.
Askalot implements all main features of popular community question answering systems and extends their functionality to support the education domain and its processes.
EdX is one of the leading providers of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) that was established back in 2012 by MIT at Harvard University. By April 2015 the approximate number of users is over 4 milion and it is being used at more than 70 universities and non-profit organisations.
MOOC is a course that is provided to unlimited number of participants and is available via Web interface. The course usually consits of several presentations and tasks. Additionally, it supports some kind of community discussion or forum. These courses are results in the field of remote education.
Source Wikipedia
Team AskEd consists of six students in the first year of their master studies at FIIT STU and their mentor Ivan Srva.
He is involved in the research in the field knowledge sharing information systems focusing on CQA systems. He has experience with programming languages and web technologies like Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Node.js and with database technologies MySQL and PostgreSQL. He participated on various projects that are succesfully being used at the faculty (e.g. YonBan). He is interested in photography, traveling and tourism. In his free time he likes to play with bubble blower.
He works with web technologies, mainly PHP (Nette, Yii2), JavaScript (jQuery) and CSS (Bootstrap). In his Bachelor's thesis he was working on dynamic recommendation system.
In his Bachelor's thesishe worked on utilizing word vector models for automatic text lemmatization by using the word2vec tool. He is interested in web technologies and development of web applications. He speaks fluently PHP, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, C++, PostgreSQL... He likes to play music instruments and he is interested in filmmaking.
In her Bachelor's thesis she worked on reports based on library data and developed web application for this purpose. Thanks to this project she started to be interested in web technologies in general, mainly user experience and design. In her job she continuous working on special reports including HTML and CSS technologies. In her free time she likes art (drawings, paintings) and she likes reading books too.
In his Bachelor's thesis he was researching the user reputations in CQA systems and implementing the results of the research into own method in Askalot sytem. Moreover he likes working with web technologies and his favorite framework is currently Laravel and AngularJS. He is interested in psychology, architecture and he likes reading good articles in this area.
In his Bachelor's thesis he was working on testing of android aplications. He has rich experiences with programming in Java language and testing of web applications using Selenium scripts. In his free time he is participating the student organization IAESTE from which he gained the skills in the web applications development.
In his Bachelor's thesis he was working on time series and predictions. He is interested in development of web applications. He likes Ruby on Rails and HTML5. In his free time he likes to watch TV series or listens to good audiobooks.
