News from e-Learning companies
Khan Academy: Raising the quality of discussion
Intern Drew Bent and designer Kitt Hirasaki have created automatic tools to improve the quality of discussion on Khan Academy videos and CS explorations.Our engineers have put an emphasis this summer on improving moderator tools. We have taken on a few new volunteer ‘Guardians’ who help us moderate discussions. They are helped out by our users who do a great job flagging low-quality posts. However, even with all this, the number of posts the Guardians have to sift through can be daunting. Drew and Kitt came up with a naive, but surprisingly effective, automatic way to detect low-quality questions and answers *before* they are posted. We call it our Robot Army.By standing on the shoulders of giants, we came up with several heuristics that can detect and prevent offensive and low-quality posts. We look for everything from abnormal uppercase-to-lowercase ratios to content with little substance. We also try to prevent users from asking for things like up-votes.Notifying the u…