The AlgoViz Portal: Lowering the Barriers for Entry into an Online Educational Community

我们试图建立一个新的模式，在线教育社区，基于数字图书馆模型的信息通过搜索集合。相反，我们专注于通过成员对内容项的讨论、评论和评级，由社区驱动的内容所增加的价值。为了获得社区输入的临界质量，我们必须通过将来自内容和社区的信息传播到社区成员经常使用的通知流中，积极降低参与的障碍。这包括传统的传播机制（用于收集的网站，论坛，电子邮件，以及用于通知的在线博客和时事通讯）和更新的通知流（用户可以订阅的社交网站，以接收通知作为其日常在线生活的一部分）。我们的目标教育社区是AlgoViz项目（algoviz.org），旨在促进算法可视化（AV）在课堂上的使用。尽管被广泛认为是潜在的改善CS教育，AV的使用率从20世纪90年代中期以来进展甚微。如果反车辆软件开发人员和用户组成的有效社区传播关于反车辆软件使用最佳做法的现有知识，就可以克服已知的障碍。改善教室中的AV使用可能会影响每年成千上万学生的教育成果。一个可用AV的信息交流中心，具有基于社区的评级和审查，以及用户和开发人员之间的互动，将使教师更容易采用高质量的教育材料。我们的技术，降低障碍，以促进用户驱动的内容，教育收藏应该适用于许多教育社区。

We seek to establish a new model for online educational communities, based less on the digital library model of information gained by searching a collection. Instead, we focus on the value added by community-driven content through members' discussions, reviews, and ratings of content items. To gain critical mass for community input, we must actively lower barriers to participation by disseminating information from both the content and the community into the notification streams that community members routinely use. This includes traditional dissemination mechanisms (web-sites for collections, forums, email, and online blogs and newsletters for notification) and newer notification streams (social networking sites where users can subscribe to receive notification as part of their everyday online life).Our target educational community is the AlgoViz project (http://algoviz.org), which aims to promote the use of Algorithm Visualizations (AVs) in the classroom. Despite being widely viewed as potentially improving CS education, the rate of AV use has progressed little from the mid 1990s. Known impediments could be overcome if existing knowledge about best practices in AV use were distributed by an effective community of AV developers and users. Improved AV use in the classroom potentially affects the educational outcomes for tens of thousands of students every year. A clearinghouse of available AVs, with community-based rating and review, and interaction between users and developers, will make it easier for instructors to adopt quality educationalmaterials. Our techniques for lowering barriers to contributing user-driven content to educational collections should be applicable to many educational communities.