National Academies Press: OpenBook

Information Technology (IT)-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report with Recommendations (2003)

Chapter: Appendix C: Summary Notes from Workshop Breakout Sessions

« Previous: Appendix B: Workshop Roster
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Summary Notes from Workshop Breakout Sessions." National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council. 2003. Information Technology (IT)-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report with Recommendations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10768.
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Page 39
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Summary Notes from Workshop Breakout Sessions." National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council. 2003. Information Technology (IT)-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report with Recommendations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10768.
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Page 40
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Summary Notes from Workshop Breakout Sessions." National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council. 2003. Information Technology (IT)-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report with Recommendations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10768.
×
Page 41
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Summary Notes from Workshop Breakout Sessions." National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council. 2003. Information Technology (IT)-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report with Recommendations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10768.
×
Page 42
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Summary Notes from Workshop Breakout Sessions." National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council. 2003. Information Technology (IT)-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report with Recommendations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10768.
×
Page 43
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Summary Notes from Workshop Breakout Sessions." National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council. 2003. Information Technology (IT)-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report with Recommendations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10768.
×
Page 44

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C Group on Architacture issues After sharing their thoughts and impressions of several initiatives, participants in the architecture working group developed a proposal for assembling a national laboratory to help individuals and groups develop interoperable systems. The laboratory would also raise awareness of TT-enabled educational tools and promote their adoption. Other thoughts that emerged from the discussions are listed below: Assemble (not "build") a laboratory modeled after the FermiLab or CERN. The new lab should be a too} for doing science and engineering, not a sandbox. The lab and plans for its activities should be based on current projects and available tools, that are making existing tools and content work. In the beginning, the lab should not be for technology creation. As new tools are developed, they should be demonstrated in the lab with other tools to ensure interoperability, etc. The lab may be modified as necessary. Exemplary learning activities involving TT tools and content should be discovered or developed in the lab. These could demonstrate applied pedagogy (e.g., a case- based learning activity in a subject such as law, medicine, business, or · ~ engineering. The objectives of the lab should be: · Open everything. Push the limits of interoperability. Promote adoption through examples and demonstrations. Although everyone agreed that the lab, or something like it, will be important to begin integrating innovations, the state of readiness for a lab wall depend on several things: the availability of lab components, tools, and content (including people and "documentation") the level of investment and commitment of resources . the level of participation by institutions and individuals The group identified several critical issues related to the creation of a lab of this kind: (~) offering different kinds of incentives; and, (~) lowering the barriers to participation. The lab should be a nonproprietary effort, but commercial participation in the lab's activities will be important. 39

4o IT-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report Participants in the technology and tools working group developed several recommendations regarding TT-enabled educational materials: · Open and content-oriented formats are preferable to proprietary formats for source documents. (Source documents are the primary storage and archive forms of documents; other formats can be derived from these by translation and aggregation.) Some domains have well developed, open-content mark-up formats e.g., MathML and OpenMath for mathematics and ChemML for chemistry.) Some disciplines do not have open-content formats, (e.g., computer science has no language- independent code markup format). The missing formats and a general knowledge/context representation format should be developed. Define the relationship between object/domain/context/metadata. Determine the level at which metadata are useful and in which contexts various levels of granularity of metadata annotation are needed. Develop tools to author and translate materials in source and target formats, including all four categories of data. identify the user communities and develop adoption plans for whatever tools and formats are ready. Get institutional commitments. (An analogy for this: AMS and ATE endorsed TeX very early on, considerably easing the adoption path). Adapt techniques that (also) deal with administrative nuisances like accreditation. Develop and fund demonstration projects for exemplary value-added educational services. Concentrate on enabling technologies and building communities rather than large-scale systems. Participants agreed that issues related to tools and technology in TT-enabled education could not be adequately addressed without also considering architecture, content, pedagogy, and the cultural environment. Discussions in the content and pedagogy working group were organized around three issues: I. What factors in the current state of practice impede the reuse of TT-enabled learning resources? a. What environment do we need to do things right? 3. What steps should we take to achieve the environment that supports our needs?

Notes from Breakout Sessions ~ ~~ 7W~ ~ ~ ~ ~ '~ Qume ~m" "~ #~# Ace 41 The learning resources developed by faculty are usually created for their use in their classrooms. The team described them as "lacking training wheels". They provide no instructor guide and no embedded advice describing how these resources should be used to meet instructional objectives. Modifying or adapting materials may require a level of effort that exceeds the perceived benefit to another faculty member. Faculty organize their coverage of material in different ways. Changing the modularity or guided sequencing of the learning process may change underlying learning pedagogy. If a faculty member finds an interesting learning resource on the web, he or she rarely finds user evaluations. As someone in the group put it, "It would be great if my colleagues indicated that this is so effective that T conclude, ~ can't afford not to use this resource!" We need filtering mechanisms to describe the instructional context of the resource and its effectiveness in that context. There is scant use of metadata to describe shared learning resources. When it exists, the vocabulary used by the author may not conform to emerging standards. The Learning Object Mode} (LOM) defined in the standards documents is so complex that most faculty won't even begin to use these important descriptors. What are the essential fields that all sharable learning resources must include? There is no centralized service (clearing house) to support the effective use of metadata. Achieving interoperability is a multidimensional task that extends beyond technical issues. If we do not express objectives in concise, performance-based terms, and if we do not have a common framework for documenting assessment data, we cannot achieve interoperability for users of sharable learning resources. ,, . a, - -- - - - - - - --of -O—-—O . We wall make no progress unless the academic community encourages faculty to work cooperatively and selflessly. This would mean a radical change in the existing academic culture! It would recognize the value of building on work by others and adapting and adopting would be encouraged. Institutions would commit resources to support teaching. Faculty would be rewarded for creating innovative teaching/learning materials, which would be treated as the "scholarship of learning" and would be of equal value with traditional research. The university must create a sustainable organization that provides the technical support necessary to use/create learning objects. Materials will be developed in such a way that they can be easily repackaged and reconfigured for a new academic context or for reuse to support training and

42 lifelong learning in industry. IT-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report The breakout group agreed that we do not know how to create an ideal environment that supports sharability. We must focus our research on the problems and approaches to achieving the promise of TT-enabled learning. The breakout group recommended the establishment of a test-bed, which would support scholarship on TT-enabled learning in real-worId learning/teaching environments: We must understand communities of learning (determining what do we know now and what we need to know)? The test-bed should include evaluations of content and pedagogy. · Activities and results should be shared and coordinated with other activities supporting TT-enabled learning (e.g. National Science Foundation Digital Library). We should adapt existing principles and approaches to software engineering, portfolio management, and customer-driven design. Rather than building a test-bed from scratch, we should build upon, and involve, organizations currently involved in related efforts. Our ultimate success wait depend on human and organizational issues. We must create incentives/mandates for designing for share-ability. The entire community- teachers, learners, and support personnel must be involved. Or onQr n° t~on'CItr' ndL I' cup ga Izal a, u ua, a ega ssues Participants in the organizational, cultural, and legal issues working group agreed that before a strategy to achieve our vision can be formulated, we must identify, categorize, and articulate the perceived impediments. Another way to state this is to ask what resources (financial, technical, cultural, theoretical, and legal) we would need to realize our vision. These following impediments were identified The absence of strong institutional and collegial commitment wait make it very difficult to achieve the vision. This entire university community (e.g., board, administration, faculty, staff, and students) must "buy in" to the idea and provide the hardware, software, staff, time, and commitment to realize the potential of TT-based education. We do not currently have user-friendly tools for authoring, modifying, maintaining, and using information content. These tonic must aIso sunnort multi-authoring and sharing. . ~ ~ The current projects often have incompatible formats and protocols that are too "human"-oriented. Computers and communication systems, as well as humans, must be able to "understand" the information.

Notes from Breakout Sessions . . . 43 We do not have a culture of community authorship. The software community has developed the beginnings of such a culture with the open-source movement, but the education community still has a single-author, single-instructor culture. Few learning models are based on cognitive theory that incorporates modern IT. Without good models and agreed-upon criteria, it is difficult to evaluate a teaching or learning system of any kind. Even if we had easy-to-use, effective, efficient systems and tools, we would still have to convince instructors and students to use them. Adoption is often a serious problem, partly because it is not always clear that there is a significant benefit, and partly because of the traditional resistance to change. Students expect to learn the way they have always learned and faculty expect to teach the way they have always taught. A minority are "early adopters," but most are not and must be convinced to use something new. The cultural attitudes about ownership of, credit for, and compensation for creating and using shared, technology-enhanced materials are based on the traditional single-author model. Mechanisms for awarding tenure, assigning salary increases, and giving recognition and rewards must be changed. A very serious impediment to the implementation of shared material systems is our traditional copyright laws and the way they are used by authors and publishers. A system being developed by the Creative Commons organization will be essential for progress. The wide diversity of our institutions, faculty, and students present a great challenge. We must involve research universities and community colleges, K-~2 schools, institutions of higher education, as well as continuing education and industrial training programs. We must also begin to collaborate with other nations, including other English-speaking countries. The systems we develop must address different learning styles, backgrounds, and preparation levels of the students, which we currently address by having a variety of schools. The global nature of our vision will present a new challenge. The current communities of authors, teachers, and students do not significantly overlap. The new model will have much more overlap, with students involved in both teaching and authoring, teachers involved in authoring, and authors becoming more aware of teaching and learning. . . Currently there is not nearly enough available content for most of the systems we envisage. There are plenty of books and journal articles, but they are not in a format for shared systems, and, under current copyright agreements, they cannot be shared. In trying to realize a vision or to convince a community to change, there is always a danger of "overselling" or promising more than can be delivered. We must be very careful that we have working systems before we start promising things we may only be able to deliver sometime in the future. The artificial intelligence community learned this lesson the hard way.

Invited Workshop Participants (can't) Marietta Baba Dean and Professor College of Social Science Michigan State University John Bailey Director of Technology U.S. Department of Education Richard G. Baraniuk Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Rice University Mariann D. Banfield Wetmaster Program and Policy Studies Services Office of the Under Secretary U.S. Department of Education Karen Billings Vice President Education Division Software & Information :Industry Association (STIA) Robert Black Deputy Director and Publications and Marketing Manager American Society for Engineering Education Sheri Brodeur University Programs Manager HewletI-Packard Company 44 Ann Q. Gates Associate Professor Department of Computer Science University of Texas at El Paso Kurt Gramoll Robert Hughes Centennial Professor of Engineering Director of the Engineering Media I~aboratory University of Oklahoma Joseph Hardin Deputy Director of the Media Union and Director of Systems Development and Operations School of Information University of Michigan Frank Huband Executive Director American Society for Engineering Education Christopher Israel Deputy Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy U.S. Department of Commerce Bruce M. Kramer Division Director Division of Engineering Education and Centers National Science Foundation

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In the last half-century, we have witnessed the birth and development of a new era: the information age. Information Technology (IT), the primary vehicle of the information age, has transformed the modern workplace and is pervasive in the development of new knowledge and wealth. IT has also dramatically influenced our capacity to educate. Yet, the application of IT in education has been disorganized and uneven. Pockets of innovation in localized environments are thriving, but the promise of open access, greatly enhanced teaching and learning, and large-scale use has not been realized.

IT-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report with Recommendations identifies critical components that support the development and use of IT-based educational materials. The report points to three high priority action areas that would produce a transitional strategy from our fragmented environment to an IT-transformed future in engineering education--Build Community; Create Organizational Enablers; and Coordinate Action. The report outlines six recommendations, including a call to establish a national laboratory to carry out evidenced-based investigations and other activities to insure interoperability and effective teaching and learning. The report stresses the need to pursue open architectures and to engage multidisciplinary researchers, including social scientists and others who address the transformation of faculty cultures. The report also discusses the need to engage users and developers of the IT-products in activities that are driven by student learning outcomes.

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