Addressing the Shortcomings of Digital Libraries of Educational Materials

这个CISE EAGER项目支持开发一个资源模型，使教育工作者能够有效地找到和利用现有的课程材料，特别是计算机科学和计算思维课程材料。虽然许多以前的努力试图建立课程材料的知识库，这些努力受到了阻碍的因素，如缺乏有效的搜索设施，缺乏可用/存储的材料，无法找到高质量的材料，或用户的商业利益的知识库的看法。总体目标是创建一个框架，以解决迄今为止阻碍此类知识库实用性的四个关键问题：更好的搜索界面，易于计算机教师（特别是K-12教师）使用，材料的临界质量，教师的评级机制，以及吸引教师的系统。该项目旨在通过提供适当的搜索和用户反馈/评级功能来解决现有存储库的缺点。此外，通过主动寻找一组初始内容，该项目可以帮助打破困扰大多数现有系统的缺乏内容/缺乏使用的循环。这个Eager项目建议沿着这些路线开发一个原型，其中有足够的内容来证明这样一个系统的概念。基于初步的结果和使用情况，这个项目可以奠定一个基础，如何最好地进行，使这样一个系统更广泛地使用的计算教育界。这个项目的智力价值在于强大的团队和远见，改善在该领域的资源计算教育工作者。 该项目将为教育工作者，特别是K-12教育工作者的数字资源系统的开发提供一个模型。这是一个重大的贡献，作为对计算机科学的现状，现有的数字图书馆没有得到广泛使用的增强。 通过提供一种替代的方法来寻找高质量的计算课程材料，这个项目计划让高质量的计算课程材料被访问和使用的计算教师的更广泛的部分。该团队实力雄厚，包括计算机科学教师、K-12计算教育工作者、教育专家以及在开发可搜索资源方面具有学术和行业经验的研究人员。该项目的更广泛影响在于对计算社区和计算教育工作者的长期利益的潜力。如果这个项目是成功的，计算学科将有一个门户网站，可以在可用性相媲美的成功门户网站在其他STEM学科。它将为通过供资和非供资来源编制的高质量课程材料提供有效的传播工具。该项目有可能通过成为计算教师在需要寻找高质量课程材料时的单一来源来改善各种计算主题和课程的教学。

This CISE EAGER project supports the development of a resource model that allows educators to effectively find and leverage existing curricular materials, particularly computer science and computational thinking curricular materials. While many previous efforts have attempted to build repositories of course materials, these efforts have been hampered by factors such as a lack of efficient search facilities, a dearth of available/stored materials, an inability to find quality materials, or the user perception of commercial interest in the repository. The overall goal is to create a framework to address four critical issues that have hampered the utility of such repositories thus far: a better search interface, easily usable by computing teachers (especially K-12 teachers), a critical mass of materials, a rating mechanism by teachers, and a system that will appeal to teachers. This project seeks to address the shortcomings of existing repositories by providing the appropriate affordances for search and user feedback/ratings. Moreover, by proactively seeking an initial set of content, this project can help to break the lack-of-content/ lack-of-usage cycle that plagues most existing systems. This Eager project proposes to develop a prototype along these lines with enough content to be a proof-of-concept for such a system. Based on initial results and usage profiles, this project can lay a foundation for how to best proceed in making such a system more broadly used by the computing educational community.The intellectual merits of this project lies in the strong team and vision for improvement in the field of resources for computing educators. This project should provide a model for development of a digital resource system that is valued and used by educators, particularly K-12 educators. This represents a significant contribution as an enhancement over the current situation in computer science where the existing digital libraries are not widely used. By providing an alternative approach towards searching for high quality computing curricular materials, this project plans to allow high quality computing curricular materials to be accessed and used by a much wider segment of computing teachers. The team is strong, including computer science faculty, K-12 computing educators, educational specialists, and researchers with academic and industry experience with the development of searchable resources.The broader impacts of this project lie in the potential for long-term benefit to the computing community and to computing educators. If this project is successful, the computing disciplines will have a portal that can be comparable in usability to the successful portals in other STEM disciplines. It will provide an effective dissemination vehicle for high quality curricular materials, developed as through funded and non-funded sources. This project has the potential to improve the teaching of a wide variety of computing topics and courses by becoming a single source computing teachers go to when needing to find high quality curricular materials.