Collaborative Writing Support Tools on the Cloud

Abstract

Academic writing, individual or collaborative, is an essential skill for today's graduates. Unfortunately, managing writing activities and providing feedback to students is very labor intensive and academics often opt out of including such learning experiences in their teaching. We describe the architecture for a new collaborative writing support environment used to embed such collaborative learning activities in engineering courses. iWrite provides tools for managing collaborative and individual writing assignments in large cohorts. It outsources the writing tools and the storage of student content to third party cloud-computing vendors (i.e., Google). We further describe how using machine learning and NLP techniques, the architecture provides automated feedback, automatic question generation, and process analysis features.