Exploring Scalability in Interfaces that Support Student Contributions within Online Learning Systems

近年来，支持众包或同侪学习的技术急剧上升，使用户社区能够共同努力改进和个性化学习资源。继续我们与D2L公司（前身为Desire2Learn）的合作，这项研究将探索如何在在线学习系统的特定背景下允许这种社区支持的数字学习。在我们成功的Engage研究的基础上，我们研究团队和D2L下一阶段合作的重点将是如何使学生能够对教师发布的学习内容做出贡献（例如，通过改进、评论或建议），并随着学生贡献数量的增加而扩大。通过这项研究，我们将设计和实现替代软件的概念验证。我们还将通过对最终用户的实证评估，探索最有希望的方法之间的潜在权衡。

Recent years have seen a dramatic rise in technologies that support crowdsourced or peer learning, enabling communities of users to work together to improve and personalize learning resources. Continuing our collaboration with D2L Corporation (formerly Desire2Learn), this research will explore ways to allow this type of community-supported digital learning in the specific context of online learning systems. Building on our successful Engage research, our focus in this next phase of the collaboration between our research team and D2L will be on ways to enable students to contribute to instructor-posted learning content (e.g., through refinements, comments or suggestions) in ways that scale as the number of student contributions increases. Through this research, we will design and implement alternative software proof-of-concepts. We will also explore potential tradeoffs among the most promising approaches through empirical evaluations with end users. This project will help solidify an establishing partnership between Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers at the University of Manitoba, and D2L, a Canadian-based company specializing in online learning systems. Through the collaboration, D2L will be able to experiment with cutting-edge HCI methods and techniques in crowdsourced learning, and the University of Manitoba researchers will gain valuable experience in adapting and/or extending these techniques in the face of real-world constraints. The expected outcomes of this project include techniques and interfaces for this type of peer-driven peer-driven online learning, along with empirically validated design guidelines. Improvements to D2L's products through research-based results will help D2L continue to be successful in a highly competitive market, benefiting the Canadian economy as well as providing future employment opportunities for HQP trained in Human-Computer Interaction.