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

我们寻求建立一种在线教育社区的新模式，这种模式较少依赖于通过搜索馆藏获得信息的数字图书馆模式。相反，我们关注的是通过会员的讨论、评论和对内容项目的评级，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日常使用的通知流中来积极降低参与的障碍。这包括传统的传播机制（用于收集信息的网站、论坛、电子邮件、用于通知的在线博客和时事通讯）和较新的通知流（用户可以订阅接收通知的社交网站，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（http://algoviz.org），它旨在促进在课堂上使用算法可视化（AVs）。尽管AV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，AV的使用率几乎没有进步。如果由AV开发者和用户组成的有效社区传播有关AV使用最佳实践的现有知识，则可以克服已知的障碍。课堂上AV使用的改善可能会影响每年成千上万学生的教育成果。现有自动驾驶汽车的信息交换中心，以社区为基础的评级和审查，以及用户和开发者之间的互动，将使教师更容易采用高质量的教育材料。我们的技术降低了向教育馆藏贡献用户驱动内容的障碍，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.