UpGrade: Sourcing Student Open-Ended Solutions to Create Scalable Learning Opportunities

In schools and colleges around the world, open-ended home-work assignments are commonly used. However, such assignments require substantial instructor effort for grading, and tend not to support opportunities for repeated practice. We propose UpGrade, a novel learnersourcing approach that generates scalable learning opportunities using prior student solutions to open-ended problems. UpGrade creates interactive questions that offer automated and real-time feedback, while enabling repeated practice. In a two-week experiment in a college-level HCI course, students answering UpGrade-created questions instead of traditional open-ended assignments achieved indistinguishable learning outcomes in ~30% less time. Further, no manual grading effort is required. To enhance quality control, UpGrade incorporates a psychometric approach using crowd workers' answers to automatically prune out low quality questions, resulting in a question bank that exceeds reliability standards for classroom use.