DLI-Phase 2: A Digital Library of Reusable Science and Math Resources for Undergraduate Education

University Of North Carolina At Wilmington, Wilmington NC

Investigators

Abstract

The main objectives of this two-year project are to build a functioning digital library of reusable instructional and learning materials for undergraduate level science and to use the library as a testbed to address several important research issues in the evolution and use of digital libraries. The project represents a collaboration between the COLLEGIS Research Institute (CRI), the Instructional Management System (IMS) Project, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW), the ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee's Digital Library (SECDL), the institutions that comprise the Computer Science Teaching Center (CSTC), and EDUCAUSE. The library content includes diverse undergraduate science-education resources coming initially from the members of the collaboration. The high quality digital resources provided by these groups range from primary source materials, such as datasets and images, to Java applets and visualization tools, to complex simulations and structured curriculum fragments. They also span a wide range of subjects from Earth sciences to pure mathematics. The library is adopting the IMS standards being created to represent instructional and learning materials in a platform-independent, reusable way. Specifically, library content is being described using IMS metadata to provide a testbed for the IMS standards. The IMS metadata is being extended as necessary to cover the diverse material being tagged. The main tasks of the project are to construct an initial version of the library, called XXDL, to incorporate the diverse content of the project partners into the library, to establish the procedures by which the resources are catalogued and reviewed independently, and to grow the library user community. The main tasks of the second year include a broad evaluation of the effectiveness of the XXDL and a more focused investigation of the roles, costs, and benefits of using the standardized IMS metadata for tagging the data. The expectation is that IMS should provide superior indexing because it has been designed expressly to characterize instructional and learning content and because the use of standards should ensure that all content catalogers apply a uniform descriptive schema to diverse learning resources. It is anticipated that XXDL users will benefit by having powerful and predictable tools with which to find appropriate learning and instructional materials. In addition to providing a "stress test" of the IMS metadata, the project should have several additional broad impacts. It directly benefits undergraduate science faculty who use the library to develop improved digital course materials. It also helps faculty to create collaborative communities to share and reuse learning resources. The evaluation of XXDL helps library developers understand how to design more effective digital libraries and online communities that encourage reuse of learning materials and collaboration. The XXDL testbed can be used for future focused investigations of digital library issues.