Open Community Authoring of Targeted Worked Example Problems

Abstract

Abstract. Open collaborative authoring systems such as Wikipedia are growing in use and impact. How well does this model work for the development of educational resources? In particular, can volunteers contribute materials of sufficient quality? Could they create resources that meet students' specific learning needs and engage their personal characteristics? Our experiment explored these questions using a novel web-based tool for authoring worked examples. Participants were professional teachers (math and non-math) and amateurs. Participants were randomly assigned to the basic tool, or to an enhanced version that prompted authors to create materials for a specific (fictitious) student. We find that while there are differences by teaching status, all three groups make contributions of worth and that targeting a specific student leads contributors to author materials with greater potential to engage students. The experiment suggests that community authoring of educational resources is a feasible model of development and can enable new levels of personalization.

The Future of Adaptive Learning: Does the Crowd Hold the Key?

“…espite the lack of its use within educational domains, crowdsourcing holds great promise for the future of adaptive education, with few substantial obstacles (Williams et al 2015a). Teachers and experts can curate and collect high quality educational resources online (Porcello and Hsi 2013), with research showing success in authoring expert knowledge for intelligent tutors and educational resources by using crowds of teachers (Floryan and Woolf 2013;Aleahmad et al 2008). However, the majority of adaptive learning technologies that offer personalized instruction lack the infrastructure required to obtain sufficient contributions from the crowd and to then return customized instruction to match students' needs.…”

Creating a Corpus of Targeted Learning Resources with a Web-Based Open Authoring Tool

“…Connexions, an open textbook authoring system, was designed to support remixing of content "modules" [11], but these are tailored to the scope of a course rather than an individual learner. The work reported here is part of a larger research program on collaborative open educational resource development around a four-phase life cycle in which system users generate, evaluate, use and improve shared materials [12]. Here we consider the potential for this open authoring paradigm to support individualized instruction.…”