Enhancing the classroom experience with faculty curated discussions

Abstract

We identify a number of metrics that attempt to recognize collaborative discussion in online annotation tools and class forums. We hypothesize that posts and questions that lead to collaborative discussion are likely to achieve the same effect if posed again. To study the effects of comment reuse, we build content curation tools that allow content that appears to stimulate collaborative discussion to be promoted or reused from previous class offerings. NB, a social annotation and discussion platform, is extended to provide such tools for annotation reuse, content promotion and curation, and content analysis based on certain metrics as potential indicators of comment quality. Related work by research partners shows encouraging results regarding the reliability of our metrics. We assess these tools through instructor interviews and user studies, establishing their usability. This work opens the door for future work on sustainably interactive and engaging learning.