eduPAL: An Online Service to Create, Manage and Evaluate Educational Projects

In this paper we describe an online service that allows students to create research-based projects assignments very easily from different sources (desktop, laptop, mobile devices) and in different formats (text, still images, audio, video, annotated media). It also provides features to allow students to not only manage projects collaboratively, but also provides customizable templates to automatically generate well-paginated reports with several layout options. In addition, it allows teachers to automatically create project assignments as templates, and uses the class roster to allow the teacher to assign the projects to individual or groups of students, and monitor the progress and assignment status for any student or group of students in real time. The service uses a combination of natural language processing algorithms and data analytics to provide semi-automatic tracking, evaluation and dynamic visualization of the students’ progress in projects assignments over time.