Ask4Summary: A Summary Generation Moodle Plugin Using Natural Language Processing Techniques

Online learning management systems (e.g., Moodle) provide students with a variety of materials in a course. If learning materials include large amount of text, students may find it difficult to gain insights. Natural Language Processing (NLP) uses computational language models to obtain knowledge from text and speech. This study develops a Moodle plugin, Ask4Summary plugin, which summarizes relevant course content for the questions asked by students in a discussion forum. First, the system parses all course text-based content documents to extract and store the information. As students ask in a discussion forum, the system parses the questions and creates responses for them. The response is a customized summary generated via matching and retrieving from the stored information. Ask4Summary plugin is an open-source project and has been approved by Moodle. The tool is available for users to download from the Moodle plugins directory. For the next step, the research team has an evaluation plan to implement the plugin in a graduate level academic writing English course in collaboration with an Asian university. The questionnaire covers the perceived usability of the plugin and teachers and student's perceptions. It is expected that evaluation results demonstrate that the plugin generates an adequate summary for each question. The plugin might extend beyond the use in online learning (e.g., medical records, legal documents).