Creating and Sharing Educational Resources

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• 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

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History

• 1992 World Wide Web, conceived with the goal of
  collaborative editing along with viewing of
  documents
• http//www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hyper
  text/WWW/Proposal.html
• http//www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hyper
  text/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

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History

• LON-CAPAs 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

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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

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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

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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

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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
• Authors get satisfaction from seeing their
  resources being used by other colleagues

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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

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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.)

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Examples

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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

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Examples

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Online

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Online

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Sharing

• Modes of sharing
• Within an Institution
• Within a field
• Between Institutions
• From Publishers
• By Curricula
• On a Library

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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

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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.)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Live Demo
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Things to show

• Show process of (7-8 minutes worth)
• adding a resource from different locations
• Browse and search
• Grab a sequence from the dump (mention grabbing
  mmp)
• Grab from MMP applet, SFU (pipette), HHMI,
  Advertising (movies)
• Make clear that the sharing of resources between
  institutions is as easy as from your buddy next
  door
• FDBK/EVAL screens

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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 isnt as important
• In fact openly publishing them might be a useful
  study aid

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More Information

• www.lon-capa.org
• Next user conference
• George Washington University
• Washington, D.C.
• January 23-24 2004