Open Comment is an open source text recognition question type for Moodle. The way it handles the free text entry from students is to restrict the types of questions that can be employed into three major categories which are:

• The identification of similarities and differences between key concepts
• The analysis of numerical data which would lead to inferencing in a given domain
• The comprehension of a set text

This in effect means that there is an underlying model of causal explanation which is central to the feedback approach employed in Open Comment. It is currently being used for History and Philosophy questions from the Arts Faculty Foundation Course at the Open University.

After a time offline, I finally got around to restoring my Subversion server - well, a different server, usually in my basement. The Subversion command to get a copy of the software for Open Comment is:

svn checkout https://mini.wired4learning.com/svn/projects/OpenComment

Read access is open, but if you want to write, just ask me for a username.