Transcript Document

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.)
Examples
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
Examples
Online
Online
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
Live Demo
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
More Information
www.lon-capa.org
Next user conference
George Washington University
Washington, D.C.
January 23-24 2004