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评估（TEA）所需的技术技能的数量级减少。此外，它将寻求推进超越个人评估的TEA创作的前沿，以包括为不同的学习者创建个性化的TEA途径。这项工作将探索新的技术，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表示为可与不同和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不断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来增强教育工作者的能力，这些工具可以创建和共享开放的TEA和TEA途径，以支持大规模的深入学习，允许教育工作者在课堂上分发TEA，而不受专有评估系统的限制，引发教师创建评估的点对点市场的发展。这种中断有可能大规模地增强教育界的权能，并通过公平获得质量评估，影响中等和高等教育环境中的所有学习者。该项目将有两个独特的创新。第一个是一个可视化的编程环境，具有复杂编程结构的符号抽象，这些结构对于TEA的设计和创建是必不可少的。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），并打破了大规模访问TEA的最大摩擦点。第二种是一种开放格式，用于将TEA表示为智能对象，这些对象与平台无关，并且可以“嵌入”任何评估交付系统。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的服务器端功能。这将最终打破将TEA访问绑定到其平台的专有评估交付系统的束缚。该项目将追求两个主要的研究问题：如何有效和有用的是非技术教育工作者的TEA创作经验？TEAs是否有效地引发了有针对性的推理和思维过程？这些研究问题将有助于验证我们创新使用拟议工具的技术可行性，以实现轻松的TEA创建和分发，以及使用拟议项目创建的复杂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.