Open source release of Academic Writing Analytics

When I arrived at UTS, I spent the first 6 months or so assessing the state of play with respect to student writing. It became clear through consultations across faculties that student writing was a strategically important area for UTS teaching and learning (and indeed, for most other educational institutions). Academic writing is hard to learn, hard to teach, academics don’t necessarily want to play that role, and there is never enough capacity to give detailed feedback on submissions (never mind drafts). The possibility of providing instant, personalised, actionable feedback to students about their drafts, 24/7, was a compelling one.

We initiated the Academic Writing Analytics (AWA) project in 2015. To deliver on this vision requires integrated expertise including natural language processing, linguistics, academic language pedagogy, learning design, feedback design, user experience, and cloud computing. Truly a transdisciplinary effort, which has been enormously stimulating.

We’ve passed milestones such as establishing the technical platform, first deployments with students, first publications of what we’ve learned, and now we hit a critical one for the future development of the technical infrastructure, as well as the educational community who need to be driving this. CIC has released the AWA infrastructure open source, with developer resources, and educational resources. I am indebted to the many people who have contributed to this, both in UTS, other universities, and our key partners at Naver Labs Europe. The ATN-funded Higher Education Text Analytics (HETA) project is now collaborating around the platform, and investigating other Higher Ed applications in addition to writing.

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