Creating Reusable Educational Components: Lessons from DLESE

Reuse of educational materials is integral to many educator tasks, from designing a course to preparing for a lab or class. This article describes a study on the reuse of educational materials in the context of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE), a community-owned and governed facility offering high-quality teaching and learning resources for Earth system education. The study noted that educational resource designers often do not develop components with reuse in mind, making it more difficult or impossible for other educators to find and use their material, and that the 'findability' and reusability of community-created digital educational resources is highly dependent on the presentational and structural design of the resources themselves. The authors recommend that all resources clearly state the creator's name and contact information, relevant copyright restrictions, the most significant date for the resource (specifying creation or revision), and the intended grade level. Educational levels: Graduate or professional, Graduate or professional, Graduate or professional

Unleashing the Usefulness of Educational Resources through Mining of Educational Metadata

While there is a strong movement to develop new educational resources to bring students to the competencies represented by educational content standards, it is recognized that there are vast repositories of educational resources already developed that are suitable to address those competencies. However, these resources need to be indexed by national and state standards to make them accessible for teachers who are increasingly required to teach to certain educational standards (Diekema and Chen, 2005). In the early 1980s, a perceived a crisis in the American education system encouraged the creation of national standards by professional subject-area organizations such as the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics. These national standards aimed to clearly define what students in certain grade levels are expected to know in core subject areas (Ratvitch, 1995). Eventually all states followed suit and published their own educational standards, often using the national standards as a guideline. Adding state standard information of every state to each resource is a large task, especially when done completely manually. Manual standard to standard alignment efforts (e.g. Align to Achieve) proved too difficult to maintain as the standards exist in all core subject areas; on national, state and local levels; and are revised regularly. Each set of standards utilizes discrete language, differing grade bands, distinct organizational structures and different levels of specificity in the coverage of a particular standard. To remedy these problems the Center for Natural Language Processing (CNLP) at Syracuse University has created a technology (Standards Alignment Tool – SAT) for automatically aligning state standards and national standards (Diekema et al., 2007). This paper explores whether it is possible to exploit existing manual standards assignments by mining the groups of standards that have been assigned to a particular resource. In other words, rather than requiring explicit manual alignments between equivalent standards, this preliminary research is trying to use the assignment of standards as metadata to resources to determine which state standards might be equivalent. An increasing number of manual standards assignments is becoming available, possibly making this approach a viable and sustainable option. The ultimate goal of this research is to establish an automatic correlation between standards based on their shared occurrence. At the initial stage we are only considering groups of standards that were assigned to the same lesson plan. Eventually we’ll take into the co-occurrence statistics of standards across the entire corpus of lesson plans

Curriculum Customization Service: Results of a Pilot Study and Future Enhancements

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersDigital libraries are a powerful tool for delivering educational resources to the classroom. We have been investigating ways to enable the use and repurposing of educational resources to support student-centered differentiated instruction. The Curriculum Customization Service (CCS) is being developed in partnership with the Denver Public Schools (DPS). It provides an on-line environment that delivers digitized curricular materials such as classroom activities, assessments and teacher support materials, and interactive digital library resources in the context of district learning goals. In this poster we will (1) describe the technical underpinnings of the service (2) highlight the results of a pilot study that was conducted in the fall of 2008 and (3) describe new features that are being developed for an expanded DPS field trial scheduled to begin in fall 2009. The CCS software is built using the open source EduPak digital library infrastructure available through the NSF-funded National Science Digital Library (NSDL) program. The EduPak components include the NSDL Collection System, the Digital Discovery System (DDS) and the NSDL Data Repository. Curricula are described using a linked data model that includes objects such as units, district standards, activities, educational resources and assessments. These curricula are cataloged and managed using the Collection System, and for the fall 2009 trials, user-contributed content will be saved to and retrieved from the Discovery System and Data Repository. Each of the EduPak components provides Web service APIs, which are used to generate rich user interfaces in the CCS. In addition, DDS services are being used to automatically pull in digital resources from the Digital Library for Earth System Education and link them to district learning goals in the curriculum. Ten middle and high school teachers participated in a user-center design process to produce a prototype system for pilot testing. During a 10 week period the CCS was used in place of paper-based student texts and teacher guides for planning and teaching. Our research focused on teacher use of tool features, and impacts on teachers' efforts to improve student engagement and learning. Teachers' use of the system was tracked through Web logs and Google Analytics, and data on individual experiences were gathered using surveys, phone interviews, and reflective essays. Analysis showed that integrating curricular materials, instructional guides and digital resources in a single interface and in the context of learning goals supported teachers' instructional practice efficiently. Access to interactive resources to improve student engagement and capture their interest was reported as the primary use of the system. In the fall of 2009 an expanded field trial including all 110 Earth Science teachers from DPS is scheduled. With continued input from the teachers, the system is being enhanced with additional customization and collaboration features. Teachers will be able to save, annotate and tag digital library resources and upload and save files to a personal workspace, and tie them directly to the district learning goals and activities in the curriculum. Social networking features will enable sharing and discovery of others' contributions and make visible aggregated activity trends within the system, such as the most popular digital library resources selected by the teachers. Use tracking and survey instruments similar to the previous study will be collected and an analysis and report is expected to follow in the spring of 2010.National Science Foundation (NSF); National Science Digital Library (NSDL