Addressing the Shortcomings of Digital Libraries of Educational Materials

这个CISE EIGHER项目支持开发一种资源模型，使教育工作者能够有效地找到并利用现有的课程材料，特别是计算机科学和计算思维课程材料。虽然以前的许多努力都试图建立课程材料的储存库，但这些努力受到一些因素的阻碍，例如缺乏有效的搜索设施，缺乏可用/储存的材料，无法找到高质量的材料，或用户认为储存库有商业利益。总的目标是建立一个框架，以解决迄今为止阻碍这类资料库使用的四个关键问题：更好的搜索界面，便于计算机教师(特别是K-12教师)使用，材料的临界质量，教师的评级机制，以及将吸引教师的系统。该项目力求通过为搜索和用户反馈/评级提供适当的负担来解决现有储存库的缺点。此外，通过主动寻找一组初始内容，该项目可以帮助打破困扰大多数现有系统的内容不足/使用不足的循环。这个急切的项目建议沿着这些路线开发一个原型，该原型具有足够的内容，可以成为这样一个系统的概念验证。根据初步结果和使用情况，该项目可以为如何最好地继续使这样的系统更广泛地被计算教育界使用奠定基础。该项目的智力优势在于为计算教育工作者在资源领域的强大团队和改进远见。这个项目应该为开发一个受到教育工作者，特别是K-12教育工作者重视和使用的数字资源系统提供一个模式。这是一项重大贡献，是对计算机科学中现有数字图书馆未得到广泛使用的现状的改进。通过提供另一种寻找高质量计算课程材料的方法，该项目计划允许更多的计算机教师访问和使用高质量的计算课程材料。这个团队很强大，包括计算机科学教师、K-12计算机教育工作者、教育专家，以及在开发可搜索资源方面具有学术和行业经验的研究人员。该项目的更广泛影响在于对计算社区和计算教育工作者的长期好处的潜力。如果这个项目成功，计算学科将拥有一个在可用性方面可以与其他STEM学科中成功的门户相媲美的门户。它将为通过资助和非资助来源开发的高质量课程材料提供有效的传播工具。这个项目有可能改善各种计算主题和课程的教学，成为计算机教师在需要找到高质量课程材料时的单一来源。

This CISE EAGER project supports the development of a resource model that allows educators to effectively find and leverage existing curricular materials, particularly computer science and computational thinking curricular materials. While many previous efforts have attempted to build repositories of course materials, these efforts have been hampered by factors such as a lack of efficient search facilities, a dearth of available/stored materials, an inability to find quality materials, or the user perception of commercial interest in the repository. The overall goal is to create a framework to address four critical issues that have hampered the utility of such repositories thus far: a better search interface, easily usable by computing teachers (especially K-12 teachers), a critical mass of materials, a rating mechanism by teachers, and a system that will appeal to teachers. This project seeks to address the shortcomings of existing repositories by providing the appropriate affordances for search and user feedback/ratings. Moreover, by proactively seeking an initial set of content, this project can help to break the lack-of-content/ lack-of-usage cycle that plagues most existing systems. This Eager project proposes to develop a prototype along these lines with enough content to be a proof-of-concept for such a system. Based on initial results and usage profiles, this project can lay a foundation for how to best proceed in making such a system more broadly used by the computing educational community.The intellectual merits of this project lies in the strong team and vision for improvement in the field of resources for computing educators. This project should provide a model for development of a digital resource system that is valued and used by educators, particularly K-12 educators. This represents a significant contribution as an enhancement over the current situation in computer science where the existing digital libraries are not widely used. By providing an alternative approach towards searching for high quality computing curricular materials, this project plans to allow high quality computing curricular materials to be accessed and used by a much wider segment of computing teachers. The team is strong, including computer science faculty, K-12 computing educators, educational specialists, and researchers with academic and industry experience with the development of searchable resources.The broader impacts of this project lie in the potential for long-term benefit to the computing community and to computing educators. If this project is successful, the computing disciplines will have a portal that can be comparable in usability to the successful portals in other STEM disciplines. It will provide an effective dissemination vehicle for high quality curricular materials, developed as through funded and non-funded sources. This project has the potential to improve the teaching of a wide variety of computing topics and courses by becoming a single source computing teachers go to when needing to find high quality curricular materials.