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