Ensemble adds a computing pathway to the existing set of NSF STEM Digital Libraries (NSDL). The addition ensures that the NSDL pathways provide a more complete coverage of STEM areas. The computing pathway supports the full range of computing education communities, provides a base for the development of programs blending computing with other STEM areas, and produces digital library innovations that are propagated to other NSDL pathways. Since computing communities including computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, information science, information systems and information technology continue to rapidly evolve; the computing pathway greatly aids computing educators in those areas. The computing pathway also addresses diversity, the complex interactions across the computing communities, as well as meeting the future need for increasing the numbers of computer related graduates. Ensemble reaches across the full range of audiences for computing education from K-12 to graduate and professional education.
Ensemble creates a distributed portal providing access to the broad range of existing educational resources while preserving the collections and their associated curation processes. Ensemble encourages contribution, use, reuse, review and evaluation of educational materials at multiple levels of granularity. To accomplish the overall goals, the Ensemble team works directly with relevant professional societies and accreditation agencies to articulate inter-relationships among the computing communities.
This project was part of the National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) program whose goals included: enabling the discovery, collaborative selection, organization, and effective usage of quality learning and teaching resources appropriate for educators and learners. As a pathway project within NSDL, we added to NSDL content, and addressed needs of the computing education community, i.e., the computing portions of disciplines including computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, information systems, etc. To meet our goal of providing a distributed digital library over a broad range of existing and new collections of resources for computing education, we developed and continue to host a Web-based digital library with an integrated search capability over a broad range of resources from a variety of contributing collections: algorithm visualization resources from AlgoViz, curricular materials from The Beauty and Joy of Computing – an introductory CS course developed at UC Berkeley, Nifty Assignments developed at Stanford, the educational materials from the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), a digital library curriculum developed at Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, content related to security issues, model assignments from artificial intelligence educators, curricular resources, etc. Automation has been incorporated into many aspects of our collection development work, including the use of machine learning (building classifiers, and applying transfer learning methods) in our work with YouTube and Slideshare. To meet our goal of providing better access and interconnection among resources, the Ensemble site includes the terms and relationships from the Computing Ontology. The system supports automatic suggestion of search terms from the ontology, based on terms that a user types into the search box. To meet our goal of supporting emerging computing education communities, Ensemble offers homepage support, and allows a new community to contribute resources, manage a discussion forum, and have a calendar. Communities supported include: the Association of Computing Machinery Education Board, the individuals and groups working to develop the Computer Science 2013 curricular guidelines for CS, etc. To meet our goal of contributing to NSDL and other digital library communities, we have made innovative software features available to the Drupal open source community and have published descriptions of our research and technology. We have integrated social software into Ensemble: encouraging users to provide comments and ratings for content, providing badges to reward users for their activity, and showing the popularity of resources – based on the number of other users who have clicked on each resource. We also have created a new collection to aid teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) topics in middle school and high school robotics courses. This collection has robotics courses from different teachers, where each course can be described using a different structure – to match the pedagogical/teaching style of the teacher. The site offers useful features for dealing with complex course structures including: a navigation panel that works for all courses – regardless of the structure, and a select/reorder feature that allows a teacher to build a customized version of a course – in order to download it for use in a classroom that is not connected to the Internet and to create a new (clone) course in the main site. This site hosts an extensive curriculum, STEMRobotics 101, with over 500 resources designed to support teaching robotics. The STEMRobotics 101 course has been cloned and adapted more than a dozen times; the original curriculum was designed for middle school. Customized courses have been created for an abbreviated summer program, for a high school robotics course, etc. The resources from STEMRobotics are featured in the Ensemble site and are also available to the larger NSDL community. STEMRobotics allows the user to see courses and materials from a variety of perspectives. Users can see how individual resources fit into different courses, and are mapped to educational standards that are incorporated into the site. The STEMRobotics software also has been used to support a site devoted to computer security education, and a site for middle school science and digital libraries. The intellectual merit of this program stems from the advanced features we have developed and showcased in the Ensemble and STEMRobotics sites, including: social navigation features, distributed portal architecture, automated methods to build new collections using machine learning techniques, generalized features for managing complex structures, and the development of an innovative repository called Walden’s Paths. The broader impact of this project stems from the large number of communities that we have supported directly on the Ensemble site, the large number of resources that we make available through the Ensemble site through an integrated search facility, and the many contributors who have placed their resources in the Ensemble and STEMRobotics site.
