SBIR Phase I: EasyAuthor - An End User Authoring Tool for Open and Intelligent Technology-Enhanced Assessments.

该SBIR第一阶段项目将研究基于云的协作编写工具的可行性，以实现编写技术增强型评估（tea）所需的技术技能的数量级降低。此外，它将寻求推进TEA创作的前沿，超越个人评估，包括为不同的学习者创建个性化的TEA途径。这项工作将探索新技术，包括符号抽象，以实现复杂编程结构的可视化设计和实现，以及将tea表示为可与不同的专有评估平台互操作的“智能对象”。这一努力旨在打破大型组织对日益增长的评估市场的束缚，由于成本和技术技能的障碍，教育工作者被边缘化。它将通过提供易于使用的工具，使教育者能够创建和共享开放的TEA和TEA路径，以支持大规模的深度学习，使教育者能够在教室中分发TEA，而不受专有评估系统的限制，从而引发教师创建评估的点对点市场的演变。这种破坏有可能通过公平获得高质量的评估，大规模地赋予教育工作者群体权力，并影响中等和高等教育环境中的所有学习者。这个项目将有两个独特的创新。第一个是可视化编程环境，其中包含对tea的设计和创建必不可少的复杂编程构造的符号抽象。这将使非程序员能够直观地创作复杂的tea（这在今天是不可能的），并打破实现大规模访问tea的最大摩擦点。第二种是将tea表示为智能对象的开放格式，这些智能对象与平台无关，并且可以“嵌入”在任何评估交付系统中。这将促进tea在浏览器和瘦客户机环境中的分发和使用，而不需要专有系统强制要求的服务器端功能。这将最终打破将TEA接入其平台的专有评估交付系统的束缚。该项目将继续研究两个主要问题：TEA编写经验对非技术教育工作者的效率和有用程度如何？tea在引出有针对性的推理和思考过程方面是否有效？这些研究问题将有助于验证我们创新地使用所提议的工具的技术可行性，从而使TEA的创建和分发变得容易，以及使用所提议的项目创建的复杂TEA在提供目标学习证据方面的有效性。

This SBIR Phase I project will research the feasibility of a cloud-based, collaborative authoring tool to achieve an order-of-magnitude reduction in technical skills required to author technology-enhanced assessments (TEAs). Additionally, it will seek to advance the frontiers of TEA authoring beyond individual assessments to encompass the creation of personalized TEA pathways for diverse learners. The effort will explore novel technologies including a symbolic abstraction to enable visual design and implementation of complex programming constructs, and the representation of TEAs as "intelligent objects" interoperable with disparate and proprietary assessment platforms. This effort seeks to break the stranglehold of large organizations on a growing assessments market that marginalizes educators due to barriers of cost and technology skills. It will empower educators by making available easy-to-use tools that enable creation and sharing of open TEAs and TEA pathways to support deeper learning at scale, allowing educators to distribute TEAs in a classroom without being restricted by a proprietary assessment system, triggering the evolution of a peer-to-peer marketplace for teacher-created assessments. This disruption bears the potential to empower educator communities at scale and impact all learners in secondary and tertiary education settings through equitable access to quality assessments. This project will feature two distinctive innovations. The first is a visual programming environment with symbolic abstraction of complex programming constructs that are imperative for the design and creation of TEAs. This will enable intuitive authoring of complex TEAs by non-programmers (an impossibility today) and break down the biggest friction point for achieving access to TEAs at scale. The second is an open format for representation of TEAs as intelligent objects that are platform agnostic and "embeddable" in any assessment delivery system. This will facilitate distribution and usage of TEAs in browsers and thin client environments without the need for server side functionality mandated by proprietary systems. This will eventually break the stranglehold of proprietary assessment delivery systems that tie TEA access to their platforms. The project will pursue two primary research questions: How efficient and useful is the TEA authoring experience for non-technical educators? Are the TEAs effective in eliciting targeted reasoning and thinking processes? These research questions will help validate the technical feasibility of our innovative use of the proposed tool to enable easy TEA creation and distribution, and the efficacy of the complex TEAs created using the proposed project in providing evidence of target learning.