Rice University, in collaboration with the College Board, is creating an online digital library for high school Advanced Placement (AP) students and teachers of Biology, Physics and Chemistry (BPC). The AP program, administered by the College Board, is accepted both nationally and internationally as a demanding undergraduate level curriculum taught in high schools. In a two-phased process, the Advanced Placement Digital Library (APDL) is building a collection of educationally valid Internet resources. In Phase One, educational resources directly related to BPC topics and concepts are researched and collected by project personnel, reviewed and validated by master AP teachers and college faculty, and cataloged and organized by the topics and concepts taught in these three courses. In Phase Two, the collection opens to AP teachers and students, and through their input, APDL serves as a valuable source of dynamically updated resources. APDL serves as a reservoir of resources where teachers and students can educate themselves about BPC concepts, at their own pace, at a time and place of their choosing, and take individualized knowledge-building paths based on interest and needs.
APDL is collecting resources for these three subjects through a collaborative construction process using a content panel for each subject. The review panel consists of several AP constituents: a higher education faculty member who has in-depth knowledge of the AP curriculum and holds leadership positions to influence change; five AP teachers with considerable experience in teaching students and their peers; an undergraduate student who is studying the subject at the university level; and two project content experts. The panel selects only those resources that support advanced study of the topic. A collection created through such a broad review is then opened to the larger community of AP teachers and students for their use and input. Peer-review of both teachers and students is visible to the users. The end result is a body of resources aligned to AP topics in BPC and searchable by concept. For each course, teachers find a topic outline of that is hyperlinked to the collected resources.
AP teachers are informed about APDL via the more than 60,000 College Board professional development conferences that occur nationwide. The College Board is committed to housing the collection on their official site, AP Central, with over 50,000 registered users. While students and teachers of advanced science courses are the targeted audiences for this collection, we expect it to be useful to others such as, a large body of Pre-AP teachers, high school teachers and students taking non-AP courses, undergraduate students and higher education faculty teaching introductory courses in these subjects.
Significant co-funding of this project is being provided by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the NSF Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences in recognition of the importance of a digital library collection of learning resources for students in the disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics.
