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).

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.