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OpenCourses Proposal Synopsis
To develop and benchmark a process for creating interactive corpora using intensive client feedback, a software platform shall be developed. Its requirements will be open, and procurement will be managed by a consortium of universities. Suppliers will be required to open the source code at some interval (approx. 6 months to 3 years) after delivery of the executable code. The interval will be negotiated to maximize the utility of grant monies and so that contributing programmers, private investors and other licensors can expect interesting returns.
The platform will allow recording of live collaboration (with typing, drawing, talking) between at least two parties in a windowed environment. Learners will be able to raise interactions, starting in the context of on-line but static “course binders”, like MIT’s OpenCourseWare.
On-line learning systems are copious content generators, and the synchronous media used by this platform would be overwhelming if not for built-in selection mechanisms. Learner’s ratings of all live and recorded segments will be an important quality measure, but not the only one. For example, new questions will pass first to other students. Then, if the student gives a rating of C, D, or F, the interaction will be escalated to assistants and faculty, if needed. For the most part, students will be grading their peers, but this mechanism will also be used to assess the TA’s contributions, and even the top level content created by faculty and experts (all content is recursive).
The interactions will be recorded, and the grades will help select the best answers for future students (the predictive models being a topic for researchers using open interfaces to the platform). The best answers might not be revealed until other students have tried to answer the question. Indeed, faculty will be encouraged to use students' teaching performance as part of their final grades, which will encourage students to help each other and change the proportion of live to pre-recorded interactions.
Users
will also be able to disagree. In
this case, high ratings will cause the disagreement to escalate.
If important changes result, learners given the incorrect material will
be notified, and credit issued to the challenger.
PIs from a few leading universities will initially submit this proposal and recruit teaching faculty. One PI will be responsible for benchmarking. Ideally, the courses should be available for cross-registration at all participating schools.
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