Improving Course Content and Providing Intelligent Support Simultaneously: (Abstract Only).

This lightning talk describes our current effort to create a system that helps teachers organize the content of their computer science courses while simultaneously providing a basis for intelligent support. This work blends the disciplines of computer science education, artificial intelligence in education, and instructional design to create a holistic system that helps teachers create a unified vision of their course from diverse learning resources and assessment techniques. The vision is created in the form of a concept map with links to external materials and assessments (including traditional materials like textbooks and exams, and more advanced technology like online interactive practice environments). We are creating these concept maps for our computer science curriculum at Ithaca College and we have found clear benefits to organization and content. Beyond these improvements to courses, we seek to use the resulting concept map to offer intelligent support for students and instructors. Students can benefit by seeing their assessment automatically summarized by concept rather than by assignment, and receive suggestions of materials crucial to their understanding. Instructors can benefit from assessment summaries about individuals/ or entire classes/ understanding of specific concepts. The system can also make recommendations for dynamic groups to be formed for short-term in-class collaboration. Currently we have basic prototypes of this functionality and we/re seeking feedback from others who may have engaged (even informally) in similar techniques, as well as any collaborators who are interested in trying this technique in their courses or integrating their materials with our system.