Collaborative Research: Developing and Assessing Effective Cyberlearning within the STEMWiki Hyperlibrary

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This is a collaborative project involving the University of California, Davis (Award DUE-1525862), Diablo Valley College (Award DUE-1525057), Howard University (Award DUE-1524638), the College of Saint Benedict (Award DUE-1525021), Hope College (Award DUE-1524990), and the University of Arkansas, Little Rock (Award DUE-1525037).This project will expand the content and capabilities of the STEMWiki Hyperlibrary, which was launched to provide vetted Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) learning resources to the public in the form of easily accessible, online college textbooks that alleviate the rising costs of postsecondary education. The STEMWiki Hyperlibrary consists of a number of connected, discipline-focused hypertext applications (ChemWiki, BioWiki, MathWiki, StatWiki, GeoWiki, PhysWiki), which are freely accessible to students regardless of socioeconomic or educational backgrounds. The ChemWiki (http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu) is currently the most developed STEMWiki, with millions of visits each month. By making high-quality STEM learning resources readily available, the project will positively impact at least four main populations: (1) the non-science community; (2) socioeconomically disadvantaged students; (3) smaller or financially disadvantaged academic institutions, including high schools, that wish to adopt new learning technologies but cannot afford the initial steep costs of a new curriculum; and (4) discipline-based education researchers looking for a platform on which to evaluate new interdisciplinary approaches and curriculum modifications, which would otherwise absorb too large of a budget to develop from scratch. Once sufficiently developed, the Hyperlibary will be a power platform for the dissemination of new educational content and the evaluation of emerging educational technologies.The STEMWiki Hyperlibrary is designed as a collaboratively constructed learning environment that enables the dissemination and evaluation of new educational resources and approaches as online course textbooks, with an emphasis on data-driven assessment of student learning and performance. The STEMWikis allow learners to cooperatively construct and organize knowledge, providing an important alternative to "one size fits all" instruction in which content is presented in a static, prepackaged manner. In this project, the investigators will augment the constituent STEMWikis of the Hyperlibrary with ancillary homework and simulation applications, as well as formative assessment modules. They will integrate the content of the STEMWikis both horizontally (across multiple STEM fields) and vertically (across multiple levels of complexity) within a network that will provide not just single textbooks but a rich "hyperlibrary" through which new, interconnected STEM textbooks can be constructed. The result will be an easy-to-use platform on which faculty members can collaborate to create and publish reusable, online pedagogical content. The project team will add ancillary online homework (the Student Ability Rating and Inquiry System [SARIS]) and simulations (via the ChemCollective, http://www.chemcollective.org). From these components, they will build an assessment infrastructure that tracks and correlates use of individual Wiki-based textbooks with simulations, homework activity, and exam performance, with the goal of identifying and tracking student performance across multiple STEM curricula.