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

我们寻求为在线教育社区建立一种新的模式，更少地基于通过搜索馆藏获得的信息的数字图书馆模式。相反，我们通过成员的讨论、评论和对内容项的评级来关注社区驱动的内容所增加的价值。为了获得社区投入的临界质量，我们必须积极降低参与门槛，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。这包括传统的传播机制(收集、论坛、电子邮件和在线博客和时事通讯通知的网站)和较新的通知流(用户可以订阅接收通知的社交网站，作为他们日常在线生活的一部分)。我们的目标教育社区是AlgoViz项目(http://algoviz.org)，，旨在促进算法可视化(AV)在课堂上的使用。尽管被广泛认为有可能改善计算机科学教育，但自20世纪90年代中期以来，视听的使用率几乎没有进步。如果有效的反病毒开发人员和用户社区传播有关反病毒使用最佳做法的现有知识，则可以克服已知的障碍。在课堂上提高音响的使用可能会影响每年数以万计的学生的教育结果。一个可用虚拟现实的信息交换中心，以及基于社区的评级和审查，以及用户和开发者之间的互动，将使教师更容易采用优质的教育材料。我们的技术降低了将用户驱动的内容贡献给教育收藏的门槛，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.