EXP: Improving the Quality of Worked Examples in Open Online Homework Help Forums

EXP: Improving the Quality of Worked Examples in Open Online Homework Help Forums EXP: Improving the Quality of Worked Examples in Open, Online, Homework Help Forums The goals of the Cyberlearning program are: To better understand how people learn with technology and how technology can be used productively to help people learn, through individual use and/or through collaborations mediated by technology; To better use technology for collecting, analyzing, sharing, and managing data to shed light on learning, promoting learning, and designing learning environments; and To design new technologies for these purposes, and advance understanding of how to use those technologies and integrate them into learning environments so that their potential is fulfilled. The program will fund projects that explore opportunities for promoting and assessing learning made possible by new technologies, ways to help learners capitalize on those opportunities, new practices that are made possible by learning technologies, and ways of using technology to promote deep and lasting learning of content, practices, skills, attitudes, and/or dispositions needed for engaged and productive citizenship. Every project should therefore seek to advance understanding of how to better promote learning, how to promote better learning, or how learning happens in technology-rich environments (including relationships between people and technology that result in productive learning, access provided via technology to learning resources, such as data and scientific information, and opportunities for promoting learning through better linking of assessment to learning). Each project should also focus, concurrently, on furthering some technological innovation. The technological innovation may be targeted at advancing some innovative technology design or exploring new ways of using technologies for learning or assessment, coherently integrating such technologies with each other, and/or integrating such technologies into targeted learning environments. Especially sought are projects in which technology allows the tailoring of learning experiences to special needs and interests of groups or individuals or allows 5 expanding formal education beyond classroom settings. Targeted learning environments may be formal or informal, traditional or nontraditional, collaborative or individual, or may seek to combine or bridge several different types of learning venues. Proposed research and innovations must be grounded in theories of and literatures on learning and learning with technology. Cyberlearning innovations will not effect transformations unless they are substantively integrated into authentic learning environments, taking into account the affordances (opportunities offered) and constraints of the environment, including the capabilities, needs, and goals of agents in the environment, the resources that are available, and the physical space. At the same time, integration of technologies into learning environments may change those environments, prompting a need to understand, predict, and design for those changes. Indeed, it is expected that some technology designs and some ways of integrating technology into learning environments may challenge conventional educational practices. Cyberlearning projects must therefore include both research and development components. A significant amount of effort in all projects should go into iterative refinement of the design, implementation, or use of a technological innovation based on systematic analysis of formative data. Except in the case of some exploratory projects, formative analysis of the technological innovation should be carried out in one or more of the real-world contexts for which the technology is targeted. The research component of each project should be carried out in the context of using the technology and should advance understanding of learning with technology or learning in technology-rich environments. Projects should take into account both theoretical and practical issues, focusing on new directions while, at the same time, taking into account a future in which research outcomes inform implementations on broader and larger scales. It is important for all projects to be grounded in the latest research on how people learn and to aim to maximize the affordances of chosen technologies. Therefore, every project team, even those for exploratory projects, should include people with expertise in how people learn, the targeted technology, the targeted learners, practices of educating in the targeted learning environment, the targeted content and/or practices, and learning of the targeted content and/or practices. Cyberlearning awards will be made in three research categories, each focusing on a different stage of research and development: Exploratory (EXP), Design and Implementation (DIP), and Integration and Deployment (INDP). The Cyberlearning program will also support Capacity-Building Projects (CAP) and a Cyberlearning Resource Center (CRC). All EXP, DIP, and INDP proposals should include the following components. Additional details about what is expected for each of the types of proposals are described below in the next subsection.