Automated assessment of free text questions for MOOC using regular expressions

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To obtain the necessary information for running this type of technology in MOOC, it became necessary to create a course with assessments using regular expressions and some without. The reason for the union of assessments with regular expressions and others that were not, is to check whether such expressions introduce problems for some students when answering questions, i.e., if they prefer to respond to other questions rather than those assessed by regular expressions.
Moreover, the course called How to create an MOOC? Had no restrictions when admitting students, therefore is considered a fairly diverse sample.
But studies made on a survey in U-MOOC indicate that the student of the course is between 30-40 years old, working as an employee or independent and has graduate studies.
The MOOC has 182 automatic questions and another one peer to peer question. 36 of this questions were short answer questions evaluated with the help of regular expressions, the completion level in the MOOC for this questions can be seen on the next figure (See figure 1).

Figure 1. - Completion level of the MOOC use in this research

Therefore it can be considered reliably that students are prepared to answer questions in the right way using the technology that is being proposed. This use of technology consists only on writing correctly within a dialog box the answer to the question that the teacher indicates, without receiving any explanation of how it should be resolved.
For some months the student responses were collected (See figure 2), and although not all of them successfully completed the course, enough data to draw a conclusion about the execution of the regular expressions in the course were obtained.

Figure 2. - Students desertion...

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.... Universidad de Salamanca.
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