FAQshare: A frequently asked questions voting system as a collaboration and evaluation tool in teaching activities

This paper describes a system for managing FAQ lists with voting, to be used in an educational environment. Our goal is twofold: 1) to optimize the student-teacher interaction; 2) to evaluate the effectiveness of learning. In our FAQ sharing system students can contribute to a FAQ collection on the subject taught. They can post questions and answers (as in a standard FAQ management system) and they can vote for both types of items (questions for interest, answers for correctness). This way we let them state the importance of any question (we give them some responsibility) and we can also score them depending on: 1) "importance" of questions posted (based on voting from the whole group); 2) correctness of their answers (stated by the teacher). In this article we present our FAQ system and some use cases and ideas for student-evaluation purposes. Copyright 2002 ACM.