SBIR Phase I: EasyAuthor - An End User Authoring Tool for Open and Intelligent Technology-Enhanced Assessments.

SBIR 第一阶段：EasyAuthor - 用于开放和智能技术增强评估的最终用户创作工具。

• 批准号: 1646935
• 负责人: Shivram Venkatasubramaniam
• 金额: $ 22.5万
• 依托单位: Looking Glass Ventures, LLC
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-12-01 至 2017-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1646935&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; EasyAuthor; End; User

This SBIR Phase I project will research the feasibility of a cloud-based, collaborative authoring tool to achieve an order-of-magnitude reduction in technical skills required to author technology-enhanced assessments (TEAs). Additionally, it will seek to advance the frontiers of TEA authoring beyond individual assessments to encompass the creation of personalized TEA pathways for diverse learners. The effort will explore novel technologies including a symbolic abstraction to enable visual design and implementation of complex programming constructs, and the representation of TEAs as "intelligent objects" interoperable with disparate and proprietary assessment platforms. This effort seeks to break the stranglehold of large organizations on a growing assessments market that marginalizes educators due to barriers of cost and technology skills. It will empower educators by making available easy-to-use tools that enable creation and sharing of open TEAs and TEA pathways to support deeper learning at scale, allowing educators to distribute TEAs in a classroom without being restricted by a proprietary assessment system, triggering the evolution of a peer-to-peer marketplace for teacher-created assessments. This disruption bears the potential to empower educator communities at scale and impact all learners in secondary and tertiary education settings through equitable access to quality assessments. This project will feature two distinctive innovations. The first is a visual programming environment with symbolic abstraction of complex programming constructs that are imperative for the design and creation of TEAs. This will enable intuitive authoring of complex TEAs by non-programmers (an impossibility today) and break down the biggest friction point for achieving access to TEAs at scale. The second is an open format for representation of TEAs as intelligent objects that are platform agnostic and "embeddable" in any assessment delivery system. This will facilitate distribution and usage of TEAs in browsers and thin client environments without the need for server side functionality mandated by proprietary systems. This will eventually break the stranglehold of proprietary assessment delivery systems that tie TEA access to their platforms. The project will pursue two primary research questions: How efficient and useful is the TEA authoring experience for non-technical educators? Are the TEAs effective in eliciting targeted reasoning and thinking processes? These research questions will help validate the technical feasibility of our innovative use of the proposed tool to enable easy TEA creation and distribution, and the efficacy of the complex TEAs created using the proposed project in providing evidence of target learning.

该 SBIR 第一阶段项目将研究基于云的协作创作工具的可行性，以实现创作技术增强评估 (TEA) 所需的技术技能数量级的减少。此外，它将寻求推进 TEA 创作的前沿，超越个人评估，涵盖为不同学习者创建个性化 TEA 路径。这项工作将探索新技术，包括符号抽象以实现复杂编程结构的可视化设计和实现，以及将 TEA 表示为可与不同的专有评估平台互操作的“智能对象”。这项努力旨在打破大型组织对不断增长的评估市场的束缚，该市场由于成本和技术技能的障碍而将教育工作者边缘化。它将通过提供易于使用的工具来增强教育工作者的能力，这些工具能够创建和共享开放的 TEA 和 TEA 路径，以支持大规模的深度学习，使教育工作者能够在课堂上分发 TEA，而不受专有评估系统的限制，从而触发教师创建的评估的点对点市场的演变。这种颠覆有可能为教育工作者社区提供大规模赋权，并通过公平地获得质量评估来影响中等和高等教育环境中的所有学习者。该项目将具有两项独特的创新。第一个是可视化编程环境，具有复杂编程结构的符号抽象，这对于 TEA 的设计和创建至关重要。这将使非程序员能够直观地编写复杂的 TEA（今天这是不可能的），并打破大规模访问 TEA 的最大障碍。第二种是一种开放格式，用于将 TEA 表示为与平台无关且可“嵌入”到任何评估交付系统中的智能对象。这将促进 TEA 在浏览器和瘦客户端环境中的分发和使用，而无需专有系统强制要求的服务器端功能。这最终将打破将 TEA 访问与其平台联系起来的专有评估交付系统的束缚。该项目将追求两个主要研究问题：TEA 创作体验对于非技术教育工作者来说有多高效和有用？ TEA 在引发有针对性的推理和思维过程方面是否有效？这些研究问题将有助于验证我们创新使用所提议的工具以实现轻松的 TEA 创建和分发的技术可行性，以及使用所提议的项目创建的复杂 TEA 在提供目标学习证据方面的功效。