Tools for Authoring Educational Technology

Group Leader: Chris Riesbeck

Participants

Educational technology can provide rich learning by doing environments, some collaborative, some one-on-one, some carefully scripted and scaffolded, and some student-generated and open-ended. In our vision, "one size fits all," "spray and pray" teaching is replaced by a wide variety of motivationally rich, personally relevant, pedagogically sound, learning experiences, a vast menu for all students, from the at-risk to the gifted.

This vision depends on the development of new roles for teachers, new social contexts for learning, and significantly new kinds of technological support. Advanced technology can act as a vehicle of change for the other two, but only if it becomes widespread and pervasive. This in turn can happen only if the development of technology-based learning environments becomes dramatically cheaper and easier to build. While some examples of excellent systems exist today, they were incredibly difficult and costly to build, and they been hard to replicate in other domains. Furthermore, they are islands unto themselves, sharing neither content material nor interface elements with any other environment.

The causes are several:

• Current authoring tools are basically generic programming environments. Some support the development of enticing graphical interfaces, but most do little more than construct electronic books with multiple-choice quizzes. Such tools are theory-free. They neither guide nor critique the pedagogical soundness of the applications authored. An author has to be expert in programming, education, and subject content, all at the same time.
• The applications these tools create support very few forms of student input. A student can either pick from a pre-defined list of choices, by selecting an item in a menu or clicking on some region of a picture, or use open-ended drawing and text entry tools. The former are limiting, unrealistic, and counter to good pedagogy. The latter are uninterpretable by the application, preventing any significant feedback or guidance.
• The applications are closed systems. Each has its own representational format for subject and pedagogical knowledge, and its own set of interface elements. For example, a student wishing to use a simulated physics lab to run variations of experiments seen in a tutorial application on forces and torque has to learn a new interface and manually translate and reenter all content.
• The applications are rarely matched to student and community needs because application development is a one-way process. Students, educators, and the community at large have only minimal opportunities to influence the development process. Authors get virtually no feedback on how their applications are used and misused once they're widely deployed.
• The applications are difficult, if not impossible, for a classroom teacher to adapt to the particular needs of a given set of students.
• Applications neither take into account nor integrate well into the curriculum and the social structure of the classroom. Time spent on the computer is not integral to the rest of the class experience. At best, computer time is fun-time, at worst, it's just one more thing for students to learn, and one more loss of instruction time for teachers.

Overcoming these problems is a challenge that requires interdisciplinary as well as basic computer science research.

In our vision, sophisticated, inter-operable tools are needed for all three populations: students, teachers and authors/developers. Students need tools to support active learning: problem solving, knowledge construction, articulation and presentation. Teachers need tools to support their central activities: identifying the knowledge (or lack thereof) of the learner, eliciting individual learning styles and modalities, engaging the learner in activities that match his/her knowledge state and learning style, to form effective collaborations of learners, and to effect the skill of learning-to-learn. Authors need tools that provide pedagogical guidelines and facilitate the reuse of both domain knowledge and process components.

More specifically, our vision of the next generation of educational tools includes:

• Tools for authors that include libraries of (1) flexible, consistent, interchangeable, interface elements, (2) robust, extensible, explicit representations of content materials and task activities, (3) design rules, course templates, and exemplars based on solid pedagogical theories, (4) mechanisms for the automated collection of in-field usage data, (5) knowledge acquisition tools for capturing and generalizing pedagogical strategies from teachers and content experts.
• A coherent, open-ended, set of activity support tools for students that can be used in both highly scripted scenarios and open-ended project-based problem solving situations.
• Tools for teachers and course facilitators for monitoring, diagnosing, interpreting, and summarizing student activity, modifying and adding subject matter material, and reconfiguring the students' activity environment.

Research and Development Directions

In our vision, subject matter experts, educators, and teachers are empowered to create learning environments that are motivating, relevant, and effective for their particular student population, based on sound pedagogical principles.

Research to support this vision includes:

• developing a catalog and taxonomy of tasks and task scenarios, many derived from real world situations, for use by authors, teachers, and authoring tools when developing educational systems;
• developing a catalog and taxonomy of general cognitive and social activities that students can perform within task and project activities to enrich learning by reflection, articulation, rehearsal, and so on;
• developing a library of design rules and templates for project scenarios that tools can use to guide teachers in choosing frameworks appropriate to their needs, and instantiating those templates in coherent ways;
• basic research in the pedagogical impacts of these different task, cognitive, and social activities, in different student populations;

In our vision, students, teachers, and the community at large (parents, business, government) play a significant role in the development process. It is essential that they understand the intent and value of the tools and applications that are being developed, and have an open channel for providing feedback of all kinds to authors, tool developers, and researchers.

There are fundamental gaps in our understanding of how technology enters the educational system, what impact it has, and what contributes to success and failure. Most studies are either usability tests or pilot studies, driven primarily by developer questions, and not particularly sensitive to what teachers and students perceive as important.

Research to support this vision includes:

• developing a library of case studies on how existing tools and applications have been used and misused;
• developing and maintaining an ongoing, easily accessed, "requirements analysis" of how the needs and tasks of teachers, students and the community at large are changing as technology spreads and develops;
• developing models of Student Computer Interaction (SCI), based on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) models, that take into account both the distinctive need to promote learning, e.g., through reflection, articulation, and collaboration, and the varying modes of collaboration, from individual work, to student teams, to student, teacher, technology triads.
• developing tools and network infrastructure to allow applications to automatically maintain external repositories recording their own usage, at dynamically adjustable levels of detail;
• developing tools and infrastructure for collecting, categorizing, indexing, and delivering appropriate summaries of this rich data to other applications, students, teachers, authors, tool developers, researchers, and others in the community at large, while always protecting the rights to privacy of the students and teachers.

In our vision, the student has access to a wide variety of intelligent tools for projects and problem solving. These tools need to be highly interoperable, so that schools can acquire libraries of tools appropriate to their needs, students can choose the tools they want to use in projects and problem-solving, and student can easily connect tools together, e.g., linking data generating tools to spreadsheets to visualizing tools to CAD tools, etc.

These tools need to be usable not only in collaborative open-ended, project-based problem solving, but also in carefully crafted, scenario-based, guided simulation environments. That means tools that can work with knowledge as well as data.

Research to support this vision includes:

• developing open-ended communication protocols and representational vocabularies (domain and task ontologies) to support messages and indices of domain and task specific artifacts;
• developing reconfigurable environments of plug-and-play components that communicate and share knowledge using these protocols and vocabularies;
• developing a large set of interoperable, pedagogically "helpful" tools for students, such as data and knowledge bases (e.g., problem repositories, case libraries), qualitative simulators that can explain what's happening, text interfaces that can interpret natural language responses, data visualizers that can adapt to different levels of student knowledge, and so on;