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The rapid growth in Internet technologies has led to a proliferation in the number of Open Educational Resources (OER), making the evaluation of OER quality a pressing need. In response, a number of rubrics have been developed to help guide the evaluation of OER quality; these, however, have had little accompanying evaluation of their utility or usability. This article presents a systematic review of 14 existing quality rubrics developed for OER evaluation. These quality rubrics are described and compared in terms of content, development processes, and application contexts, as well as, the kind of support they provide for users. Results from this research reveal a great diversity between these rubrics, providing users with a wide variety of options. Moreover, the widespread lack of rating scales, scoring guides, empirical testing, and iterative revisions for many of these rubrics raises reliability and validity concerns. Finally, rubrics implement varying amounts of user support, affecting their overall usability and educational utility.

The widespread availability of high-quality Web-based content offers new potential for supporting teachers as designers of curricula and classroom activities. When coupled with a participatory Web culture and infrastructure, teachers can share their creations as well as leverage from the best that their peers have to offer to support a collective intelligence or crowdsourcing community, which we dub "crowdteaching." We applied a collective intelligence framework to characterize crowdteaching in the context of a Web-based tool for teachers called the Instructional Architect (IA). The IA enables teachers to find, create, and share instructional activities (called IA projects) for their students using online learning resources. These IA projects can further be viewed, copied, or adapted by other IA users. This study examines the usage activities of two samples of teachers, and also analyzes the characteristics of a subset of their IA projects. Analyses of teacher activities suggest that they are engaging in crowdteaching processes. Teachers, on average, chose to share over half of their IA projects, and copied some directly from other IA projects. Thus, these teachers can be seen as both contributors to and consumers of crowdteaching processes. In addition, IA users preferred to view IA projects rather than to completely copy them. Finally, correlational results based on an analysis of the characteristics of IA projects suggest that several easily computed metrics (number of views, number of copies, and number of words in IA projects) can act as an indirect proxy of instructionally relevant indicators of the content of IA projects.

Despite of much focus on professional development aimed specifically at developing teachers' technology integration skills, rigorous studies of effective PD (professional development) are lacking. Evidence is also lacking on how these skills can best be integrated with pedagogical and content knowledge to improve student learning. The purpose of this article is to present two "design-oriented" TTPD (technology-related teacher professional development) designs and investigate the designs' impact on teachers. In one TTPD (tech-only), teachers learned technology skills to create activities using online learning resources. In the other (tech+PBL), teachers learned to create PBL (problem-based learning) activities using online resources. All teachers implemented these activities with their students. Findings indicate similarities and differences across several outcomes, including teacher knowledge, teacher attitude, usage of PBL and Web usage data. In addition, an instrument was developed to measure the students' self-reported knowledge, attitudes and behavior regarding their teachers' implemented activities. The instrument was shown to be valid and reliable. Problem-Based Learning Alignment Rating Scale is appended. (Contains 10 tables and 2 figures.)

This article describes the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) process and its application in the field of educational data mining (EDM) in the context of a digital library service called the Instructional Architect (IA.usu.edu). In particular, the study reported in this article investigated a certain type of data mining problem, clustering, and used a statistical model, latent class analysis, to group the IA teacher users according to their diverse online behaviors. The use of LCA successfully helped us identify different types of users, ranging from window shoppers, lukewarm users to the most dedicated users, and distinguish the isolated users from the key brokers of this online community. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the discovered usage patterns on system design and on EDM in general.

The widespread availability of high-quality Web-based tools and content offers new promise and potential for supporting teachers as creators of instructional activities. When coupled with a participatory Web culture and infrastructure, teachers can share their creations as well as leverage from the best that their peers have to offer to support a collective intelligence community, dubbed "CrowdTeaching." This article describes the Instructional Architect (IA), a Web-based tool that aims to support these kinds of collective intelligence processes. The IA enables teachers to design and share instructional activities (called IA projects) created around online resources. These IA projects can then be viewed, copied, and iteratively adapted by other IA users. This article describes the IA and examines how teacher usage and creation activities relate to "CrowdTeaching" processes.

This article presents a quasi-experimental study comparing the impact of two technology-related teacher professional development (TTPD) designs, aimed at helping junior high school science and mathematics teachers design online activities using the rapidly growing set of online learning resources available on the Internet. The first TTPD design ("tech-only") focused exclusively on enhancing technology knowledge and skills for finding, selecting, and designing classroom activities with online resources, while the second ("tech + pbl") coupled technology knowledge with learning to design problem-based learning (PBL) activities for students. Both designs showed large pre-post gains for teacher participants (N = 36) in terms of self-reported knowledge, skills, and technology integration. Significant interaction effects show that teachers in the "tech + pbl" group had larger gains for self-reported knowledge and externally rated use of PBL. Three generalized estimating equation (GEE) models were fit to study the impact on students' (N = 1,247) self reported gains in behavior, knowledge, and attitudes. In the resulting models, students of "tech + pbl" teachers showed significant increases in gain scores for all three outcomes. By contrast, students of "tech-only" teachers showed improved gains only in attitudes.

Much recent research and funding have focused on building Internet-based repositories that contain collections of high-quality learning resources, often called "learning objects." Yet little is known about how non-specialist users, in particular teachers, find, access, and use digital learning resources. To address this gap, this article describes a case study of mathematics and science teachers' practices and desires surrounding the discovery, selection, and use of digital library resources for instructional purposes. Findings suggest that the teacher participants used a broad range of search strategies in order to find resources that they deemed were age-appropriate, current, and accurate. They intended to include these resources with little modifications into planned instructional activities. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for improving the design of educational digital library systems, including tools supporting resource reuse. (Contains 2 figures.)

Examines assumptions underlying claims regarding educational technology, and as an alternative presents a framework which integrates a bottom-up view of information technology usage and a top-down view of education. Delivery of educational materials, media, computational activities including simulations and computer games, interactivity, communication modes, and learning phase are discussed. (Author/LRW)

While many rubrics have been developed to guide people in evaluating the quality of Open Educational Resources (OER), few studies have empirically investigated how different people apply and perceive such rubrics. This study examines how participants (22 teachers and 22 non-teachers) applied three quality rubrics (comprised of a total of 17 quality indicators) to evaluate 20 OER, and how they perceived the utility of these rubrics. Results showed that both teachers and non-teachers found some indicators more difficult to apply, and displayed different response styles on different indicators. In addition, teachers gave higher overall ratings to OER, but non-teachers' ratings had generally higher agreement values. Regarding rubric perception, both groups perceived these rubrics as useful in helping them find high-quality OER, but differed in their preferences for quality rubrics and indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging online educational communities provide spaces for teachers to find resources, create instructional activities, and share these activities with others. Within these online communities, individual users' activities may vary widely, and thus different user types can be identified. In addition, users' patterns of activities in online communities are dynamic, and further can be affected by dissemination activities. Through analyzing usage analytics in an online teacher community called the Instructional Architect, this study explores the influences of dissemination activities on the usage patterns of different user types. Results show that dissemination activities can play an important role in encouraging users' active participation, while the absence of dissemination activities can further increase participation inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a comparative case study design, this paper explores the impacts of a technology-related professional development (TTPD) design aimed at helping science and mathematics teachers design classroom activities using the wealth of resources available on the Internet. Using the lens of curricular adaption and the notion of teachers' varying pedagogical design capacity, we analyzed the experiences of four teachers in terms of the kinds of instructional activities teachers designed, how these were supported with online resources, and teachers' perceptions of impacts on student learning. Findings suggested that participants used a variety of personally relevant design strategies when applying TTPD concepts to their contexts. In particular, the teachers discussed how they tailored instruction to fit their students' needs and interests, and how they incorporated instructional games, simulations, and interactive resources to enhance motivation and provide self-paced instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes two consecutive enactments of technology-oriented teacher professional development designs, aimed at helping teachers find high-quality online learning resources and use them in designing effective problem-based learning (PBL) activities for their students. To align with current professional development prescriptions, in the first enactment, teachers learned PBL design skills concurrently with technology skills. Following aspects of design-based research, the professional development theory, participant feedback, and results from the first enactment informed the design of the second. In this second enactment, technology skills were separated and presented prior to learning about PBL. Results from a mixed-methods study of impact indicated that both professional development enactments were associated with large increases in teacher knowledge, experience, and confidence with regards to technology use and integration. Variations in the level of PBL usage by teachers in their activities, and the degree to which they discuss PBL and technology integration are presented alongside limitations, practical significance, scholarly significance, and planned future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the literature surrounding an information filtering technique, collaborative information filtering, which supports the discovery of resources in a way that is sensitive to the context of users. Moreover, via statistical clustering techniques, the system supports automated, personalized filtering and recommendation of relevant resources and like-minded users for particular user communities. The paper also describes an educational implementation of this approach, called Altered Vista, and presents results from a 3-month trial use of the system, aimed at evaluating the educational effectiveness and usefulness of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]