TeachEngineering: Expanding and Sustaining Curriculum Access for K-12 Teachers

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The TeachEngineering (TE) digital library, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has attained a reputation in the K-12 engineering education community as a high-quality teacher resource of free, classroom-tested, standards-based lessons. As the disseminator of original K-12 engineering curricula from 46 engineering grantees, the collection is accessed by 2.3M users annually, realizing 50% annual growth. The TeachEngineering lessons and activities and the interactive community forums around them support teachers in meeting new engineering-based standards in their classrooms. Attracting more, and more diverse, students to engineering for future occupations and satisfying lives cultivates ambitions in the young while setting the stage for improving and sustaining the nation's economic future. The proposed strategic improvements and user-centered research ensure TeachEngineering's ongoing relevance and sustainability.The goals of this three-year initiative include making the user experience interactive and community based, expanding collection size and usage, keeping curricula aligned with evolving K-12 STEM standards, modernizing the backend architecture for sustainability and responsiveness, and assessing classroom impact. Activities and approaches include significant expansion of direct involvement of the K-12 teacher community through the design and/or implementation of social, community based and crowdsourced features. The rich new source of information generated by this user involvement will serve to significantly improve the user experience and help index the collection for better and automated search, recommender and standards alignment facilities. Methods to be employed include partnering with the NAE's LinkEngineering community, creation of a far more integrated metamodel of the collection, implementing a model-view-controller framework, and conducting quantitative and qualitative studies on how teachers use TE in the classroom.