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

近年来，支持众包或同行学习的技术出现了戏剧性的增长，使用户社区能够共同努力，改善学习资源并使其个性化。继续我们与D2L公司(前身为Desire2Learn)的合作，这项研究将探索在在线学习系统的特定背景下允许这种类型的社区支持的数字学习的方法。在我们成功参与研究的基础上，我们的研究团队和D2L合作的下一阶段的重点将是如何使学生能够以随着学生贡献的数量增加而扩展的方式为教师发布的学习内容做出贡献(例如，通过改进、评论或建议)。通过这项研究，我们将设计和实现替代软件的概念验证。我们还将通过与最终用户的经验评估，探索最有希望的方法之间的潜在权衡。 该项目将有助于巩固马尼托巴大学的人机交互(HCI)研究人员与D2L公司之间建立的伙伴关系，D2L公司是一家专门从事在线学习系统的加拿大公司。通过合作，D2L将能够在众包学习中试验尖端的人机界面方法和技术，马尼托巴大学的研究人员将在面对现实世界的限制时适应和/或扩展这些技术方面获得宝贵的经验。该项目的预期结果包括这种类型的同行驱动型在线学习的技术和界面，以及经过经验验证的设计指南。 通过研究结果改进D2L的产品将帮助D2L继续在竞争激烈的市场中取得成功，使加拿大经济受益，并为接受过人机交互培训的HQP提供未来的就业机会。

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.