I am in the Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence
(EAAI-13), and we just concluded a session on educational repositories,
particularly online repositories of homework assignments. Repositories
of educational resources is a topic near and dear to my heart, but at
least in the case of repositories of homework assignments, there appears
to be no, little, or at best weak anecdotal evidence that assignments
are being reused. At a minimum, don't we want repositories to be
"instrumented,", like my (and everyone's) YouTube channel(s), so I can
see downloads, likes, dislikes, and more sophisticated measures of usage
that are specific to homework assignments?
Its hard to
know if a homework assignment that has been posted in a educational
repository is actually used by another instructor, unless an instructor
who has used it, gets back to me and tells me so. There is some work in
thinking about how to do this. But there is also low hanging fruit.
First, we can measure downloads, but beyond this, as an educational
community can take a small step towards a scholarly culture surrounding
education materials by designing licenses specific to this kind of
content.
For example, a license for usage of
educational content could require that the material can be used by
others (e.g., following any of the principles of creative commons
licenses: http://creativecommons.org/), but additionally require that
the user report back on the usage to the author (typically, the
copyright holder), whether the use is as is, or derivative.
I
think that this would be an incredible help to evaluating the extent
and manner of use of educational material, going well beyond measuring
downloads, and ultimately of evaluating the utility of educational
materials to the educational community.
Let's ask
people about their use, through a license that requires report back (and
nothing else), rather than simply depending of the ability of inference
by machine methods.
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