Gathering Requirements for a Grid-based Automatic Marking System

This paper reports on our experiences using a Creative Requirements [1] workshop approach to elicit requirements for a Grid-based automatic marking system. The research was conducted for ELeGI, an EU funded project whose goal is to provide a European Learning Grid infrastructure to promote a learning paradigm shift from a teacher-centred approach to a learner-centred approach. The automatic marking system uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to assess the meaning of essays written by computer science students. We foresee the marking system to be a service offered by the Learning Grid. The Creative Requirements Workshop used eight creativity triggers and testimony from an expert witness to elicit creative requirements from the participants. The participants in the workshop produced over 200 requirements in about two hours.