Authoring Teams
Overview
ESCOT organizes small teams of teachers, developers,
and producers to work through on-line collaboration
to produce challenging interactive problems. Below
this "integration team" process is described
in more detail. On the left are a collection of
resources about our co-design process that may
be useful for other projects.
ESCOT Integration Teams
Over 2 dozen teachers,
over 1 dozen developers, and a tight cadre
of educational technology experts have participated
in ESCOT integration teams. Working from a
collection of over 30 JavaBeans  components
that provide high-level educational functionality
(e.g. graphing), small teams have produced
a series of  interactive
problems. Each team is responsible for
one week's applet, and typically works together
for one month, committing approximately 40
hours per person (usually in addition to their
regular responsibilities during the month). |
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Teams are first oriented to ESCOT and the problem
production process at an annual workshop.
There teachers help identify important concepts
that could benefit from computational learning
tools. Teams then form around particular ideas
for interactive problems. These ideas are fleshed
out through storyboards,
which are refined over the course of several days
with input from the group as a whole. After the
workshop, teams rarely meet face to face, but
rather use email and instant messenging to collaborate
at a distance.
After the problem is produced, it is tested with
tens to hundreds of students on the popular MathForum
web site, results are analyzed, and feedback about
learning outcomes is created. This feedback is
made available to support quality improvement
in future iterations. We are now in our second
year of (a) refining our interoperability framework
(b) facilitating a distributed team process and
(c) producing and testing content via the electronic
Problem of the Week series. Our overall evaluations
are showing that the process is working; team
members enjoy their participation, high quality
software is being produced, and students are learning.
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