creating and sharing educational resources guy albertelli 1, ray batchelor 2, deborah kashy 1, edwin...
TRANSCRIPT
Creating and Sharing Educational Resources
Guy Albertelli1, Ray Batchelor2, Deborah Kashy1, Edwin Kashy1, Gerd Kortemeyer1, Mark Lucas3,
Hon-Kie Ng4
1 Michigan State University 2 Simon Fraser University
3 Ohio University 4 Florida State University
History
• 1992 – World Wide Web, conceived with the goal of collaborative editing along with viewing of documents
http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.html
http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/DesignIssues/Multiuser.html
• Because of how hard it is to collaboratively edit shared resources we saw a dramatic growth in the number of copies and versions of particular resources
History
• LON-CAPA’s design criteria• Unique authoritative version of the resource
• Easy to inform author of any problems with their resources
• Reliable mechanism that changes have bee made to a resource
• Metadata
• Author, Degree of Difficulty, Usage information, etc..
• Simple mechanisms to use resources in the interconnected community of machines and users
LON-CAPA
• Distributed, interconnected system of machines, grouped into logical domains (MSU, FSU, etc.)
• Inside domains are authors/content developers
• Resources can be developed and then “published”
• Access control to the resource is decided on by the author, many different granularities supported
• Open sharing, open source, closed to only specific courses, private, etc.
• Templates: common pedagogical ideas can be quickly built
Resource Issues
• Costs are high in going online• Resource creation is the biggest expense in putting a
course into a technological setting
• Testing to ensure content is reliable can be fairly intensive
• One solution is to share the costs of creation/testing between faculty or institutions• LON-CAPA provides a simple reliable mechanism
for facilitating the collaboration• Engenders a lot of cross-fertilization between disciplines
Resource Issues
• Another is have the resources adapt automatically for use in multiple contexts• Online homework, Online quiz, Printed scantron
exam, proctored online exam, printed review sheet, supplementary assessments
Resource Issues
• A large number of instructors are willing and happy to share their materials to colleagues at other institutions
• The feedback enables the reliability and quality of the resources to steadily improve• Since it is easy to send feedback this process of
improvement can happen quite quickly
• Author’s get satisfaction from seeing their resources being used by other colleagues
Creating
• Towards making creation less demanding• Allow use of external familiar tools to create web
content (commercial or others)• Web Pages, Applets, Images, Animations, Movies, etc.
• Enable reuse of existing material or non-web content• Allow upload an inclusion of any resource type inside the
systems (Word Documents, Powerpoint Slides, Mathematica Workbooks, etc.)
• Provide means to integrate external websites
Creating
• Towards making creation less demanding (cont.)• Provide internal tools to quickly create common
types of materials• Problem templates, dynamically generated materials
(tables, graphs, images, etc.)
• Template out common materials (syllabus, bulletin boards, simple HTML pages, etc.)
Student Feedback
What is wrong … whoever wrote this problem? Labeling the blocks A,C,D,B instead of the intuitive A,B,C,D order, or at least the reverse… I burned five guesses on that. What a dirty trick. … Then again, if I hadn't put this off until late tuesday night when I was tired, I may have been more attentive.
Oh well, all's fair in love and CAPA
Sharing
• Modes of sharing• Within an Institution
• Within a field
• Between Institutions
• From Publishers
• By Curricula
• On a Library
Within an Institution
• HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Initiative) is a complete first year biology course constructed to be used online• Use at MSU
• BMB 200 Along with his old CAPA stuff
• BMB 401 - as review materials
• ZOL 341 - as review materials
• PLB 105 & PLB 106 - use some resource pages along with some custom problems
• BS 110 Lab - directly used in the course
• BS 111 (1 section) - directly used in the course
• ISB 202 (1 section) - adapted to his own use
Within A Field
• Introductory Physics courses no longer need to be developed from scratch• Sufficient existing resources to satisfy almost anyone
• Back of the book problems
• Applet based simulations
• Static web pages
• Ongoing development mainly occurs in making Conceptual style problems
• Strong push towards ‘interactive’ problems• Students must extract the necessary data (graphs, applets,
diagrams, etc.)
Between Institutions
• MMP (Multimedia Physics) – first year of physics (algebra based)• MSU – used in several courses, including VU
(Virtual University) course
• TMCC – (Truckee Meadows Community College) used for their first year physics course.
• NDSU – (North Dakota State University)
• A few local high schools use it in part for their AP Physics courses
• Some high school developed resources are being used in the intro MSU physics course
From Publishers
• Several Publishers have converted ‘back of the book materials’ and allow controlled access • Serway/Jewett Physics
• Cutnell/Johnson Physics
• Walker Physics
• Tipler Physics
• Giancoli Physics
• Halliday/Resnick Physics (in progress)
• McGraw/Hill Advertising
• Prentice-Hall Advertising
By Curricula
• THEDUMP (Teachers Helping Each-other Develop Usable Materials & Problems)• No new material
• Consists only of groupings of existing resources• By Discipline and Topics within the disciplines
• Work units
• Homework sets
• The goal is to keep the cream of the crop easily found and use
On a Library
• Collaboration between MSU & MSU (Michigan State University) & (Montana State University) on a Statistics for Psychology Library• One common account that owns the resources on a
specific library server
• Two Co-Authors are collaborating on writing and testing the resources
• The resources are used in courses on both campuses
Discussion
• IP issues?• Protection of the source
• Students Sharing (www.allmsu.com)
• With a large number of very good resources the protection of the source isn’t as important
• In fact openly publishing them might be a useful study aid