Startup Idea: Automatic Grammar and Comprehension Plugin for D2L

Startup idea to develop a plugin for college educator's online software, D2L, used for grading. This plugin will automatically check grammar, comprehension and sentence complexity and give a report, in addition to the plagiarism report. It will also track the growth in student's writing skills over time.

As an college educator, grading is one of the most challenging parts of the job. Since I have gone digital, my students submit Word files to me. This makes it better than receiving hand-written work, but the bulk of their weekly assignments is busy work meant for them to do the readings. These are short written responses.

I would like to see an automatic grammar and comprehension plugin for my online software. We use D2L at my institution and it already uses TurnitIn to check for plagiarism. I was thinking in addition to the plagiarism report, I could have a percentage of, say, grammatical complexity of the sentences and errors.

The advantage of this is that I can build a clear strategy for grading. I could focus clearly on the students whose writing and efforts are subpar. This plugin would also allow me to track the growth, or lack of, in the writing skills of the students.