Addressing the Shortcomings of Digital Libraries of Educational Materials

CISE EAGER项目支持开发一种资源模型，使教育工作者能够有效地查找和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存储库，但这些努力受到诸如缺乏有效的搜索设施、缺乏可用/存储的材料、无法找到高质量的材料或用户认为存储库具有商业利益等因素的阻碍。总体目标是创建一个框架，以解决迄今为止阻碍此类知识库使用的四个关键问题：一个更好的搜索界面，易于计算教师（特别是K-12教师）使用，一个临界质量的材料，教师的评级机制，以及一个能够吸引教师的系统。该项目旨在通过为搜索和用户反馈/评级提供适当的支持来解决现有存储库的缺点。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缺乏内容/缺乏使用的循环。这个Eager项目建议沿着这些路线开发一个原型，其中包含足够的内容，以作为这样一个系统的概念验证。基于最初的结果和使用概况，这个项目可以为如何最好地使这样一个系统在计算机教育社区中得到更广泛的使用奠定基础。这个项目的智力优势在于强大的团队和对计算机教育工作者资源领域改进的愿景。这个项目应该为教育工作者，特别是K-12教育工作者所重视和使用的数字资源系统的开发提供一个模型。这是对计算机科学现状的重大贡献，因为现有的数字图书馆没有被广泛使用。通过提供一种搜索高质量计算机课程材料的替代方法，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机课程材料。该团队非常强大，包括计算机科学教师、K-12计算机教育工作者、教育专家以及在可搜索资源开发方面具有学术和行业经验的研究人员。这个项目更广泛的影响在于对计算机社区和计算机教育者的长期利益的潜力。如果这个项目是成功的，计算学科将有一个门户网站，在可用性方面可以与其他STEM学科的成功门户网站相媲美。它将为通过资助和非资助来源编写的高质量课程材料提供有效的传播工具。这个项目有潜力通过成为计算机教师在需要寻找高质量课程材料时的单一来源来改善各种计算主题和课程的教学。

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.