Standards based extensions to Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are being developed to provide contextualized and educationally relevant access to NSDL resources from any web page at any time; 2) to enable developers of open education resources to create apps that adapt to a user's context; 3) to facilitate collaboration among classmates and friends by making users aware of likely collaborators. The effort is resulting in an advance in online learning by combining and extending technologies that are in place and in use. The browser extension appears as a button in the browser and is available from any web page. The mini-portal includes (a) key terms relevant to the content of the page and the user's educational level, (b) "apps" such as Jmol, Mathlets, and Physlets that can be used to explore topics on the page, and (c) pointers to colleagues and friends who have recently looked at the same page or related topics. Rolling over a term brings up a definition and clicking on a term retrieves relevant NSDL resources.
The UCASTER project (Ubiquitous Contextualized Access to STEM Education Resources) introduced a new kind of search and discovery in which the content of a document or web page plays the role of the search string. Developed under the NSF's National STEM Distributed Learning (NSDL) project (www.nsdl.org), UCASTER enables a student to click on a single button to retrieve a list of links to the NSDL resources most relevant to whatever web page or document is currently loaded in their browser. This is a new and powerful way to access curated STEM educational resources that is more natural and less effort than navigating to, and searching in, an educational digital library. UCASTER is available as a Chrome browser plugin and Firefox extension. Once installed, it appears as a button in the browser bar. When activated, UCASTER analyzes all text displayed in the browser, identifies topics and key words in that text, matches them against an index of NSDL resources, and displays links to the top ranked resources in a browser overlay. Other features include the ability to select which NSDL collections to use as search topics and support for classes in which the teacher can promote specific resources. The UCASTER project intended UCASTER to be an educational tool but also researched UCASTER as a means to connect students (or professionals) with other students (or professionals) who have relevant expertise or interests. To do this, UCASTER developed a method for creating and maintaining "knowledge maps" that represent the topics in which a user is interested. These start by being self-reported and can (with permission) be continually updated using the topical analyses of pages browsed by the user. Intellectual Merit: UCASTER explored the technique of searching by example. This technique has now been applied elsewhere in scenarios ranging from commercial applications to a system that semi-automates the analysis of didactic content for the purpose of transforming it into interactive eLearning. The UCASTER work led to the development of new keyword generation, topic detection, knowledge mapping, tagging and semantic matching algorithms as well as to the development of an open-source system for creating web services that access domain-specific languages. All of these are fundamental advances that have been, and continue to be, applied elsewhere. The matching algorithms, for example, are being used to analyze reports in the British military and to help visualize and navigate resources in the NSDL Teach Engineering portal.The UCASTER infrastructure has also been demonstrated as a means to index and provide advanced search capabilities in the US Patent Office data base. Broader Impacts: The UCASTER plugins have been downloaded over 2000 times from CNET, and searches for UCASTER on the performing organization's web site have been running between 50 and 150 per month. The UCASTER plugin accesses dozens of digital libraries including some, such as PubMed, that were not part of the NSDL program. Overall, UCASTER demonstrates a new way to connect students and learners of all types with validated educational resources and provides a path forward for continued research into search, discovery and application of Open Educational Resources.
