Addressing the Shortcomings of Digital Libraries of Educational Materials

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

This CISE EAGER project supports the development of a resource model that allows educators to effectively find and leverage existing curricular materials, particularly computer science and computational thinking curricular materials. While many previous efforts have attempted to build repositories of course materials, these efforts have been hampered by factors such as a lack of efficient search facilities, a dearth of available/stored materials, an inability to find quality materials, or the user perception of commercial interest in the repository. The overall goal is to create a framework to address four critical issues that have hampered the utility of such repositories thus far: a better search interface, easily usable by computing teachers (especially K-12 teachers), a critical mass of materials, a rating mechanism by teachers, and a system that will appeal to teachers. This project seeks to address the shortcomings of existing repositories by providing the appropriate affordances for search and user feedback/ratings. Moreover, by proactively seeking an initial set of content, this project can help to break the lack-of-content/ lack-of-usage cycle that plagues most existing systems. This Eager project proposes to develop a prototype along these lines with enough content to be a proof-of-concept for such a system. Based on initial results and usage profiles, this project can lay a foundation for how to best proceed in making such a system more broadly used by the computing educational community. The intellectual merits of this project lies in the strong team and vision for improvement in the field of resources for computing educators. This project should provide a model for development of a digital resource system that is valued and used by educators, particularly K-12 educators. This represents a significant contribution as an enhancement over the current situation in computer science where the existing digital libraries are not widely used. By providing an alternative approach towards searching for high quality computing curricular materials, this project plans to allow high quality computing curricular materials to be accessed and used by a much wider segment of computing teachers. The team is strong, including computer science faculty, K-12 computing educators, educational specialists, and researchers with academic and industry experience with the development of searchable resources. The broader impacts of this project lie in the potential for long-term benefit to the computing community and to computing educators. If this project is successful, the computing disciplines will have a portal that can be comparable in usability to the successful portals in other STEM disciplines. It will provide an effective dissemination vehicle for high quality curricular materials, developed as through funded and non-funded sources. This project has the potential to improve the teaching of a wide variety of computing topics and courses by becoming a single source computing teachers go to when needing to find high quality curricular materials.