Planning Grant for the Use of Digital Libraries in Undergraduate Learning in Science     NSF Award - #9816026	Old Dominion University Digital Library  Research Group
Motivation

This project focuses upon the value of collaborative resource discovery as a valuable component of active learning and of archival storage, with resource discovery, as a mechanism for reusing science course material across multiple course offerings, across faculty within a department, and across universities. Current obstacles to this discovery and reuse include the many methods of course delivery and of storing content, the lack of simple tools that could be used spontaneously, and the lack of structured repositories, cataloging and publishing tools on the web. Search engines produce too many hits and provide no qualitative evaluation of the resources discovered. Domain specific libraries exist that solve this problem but there are simply too many diverse libraries with no unified access.

This planning grant was designed to investigate several questions: 1) Is a digital library an effective way to store and organize teacher's and students' material? 2) What effort level is required to publish into and to maintain such a library?  3) How difficult is it to use by faculty and students with varying technical backgrounds? 4) What organizational structure in a digital library will improve user satisfaction? 5) How can we measure the effects of student research via digital libraries on the rate of or improved learning in science and engineering courses? 6) Will students perceive an advantage  in publishing their personal course portfolio into a digital library?
 

Our vision, which has emerged from studying these questions, is of flexible, extensible digital course objects that are persistent, ubiquitously accessible, and come with a teacher ``seal of approval''. We propose development of an Undergraduate Digital Library Framework  (UDLF) and a  reference implementation to support an undergraduate Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education (SMETE) digital library. This framework provides tools and methods for:

• creating and archiving courses and course offerings;
• reuse of existing course material  to evolve courses through changes in content, structure, and delivery mechanisms;
• the dynamic creation of focused libraries for specific undergraduate courses and to allow simple, browser-based collaboration in support of active learning

We are building on three ongoing projects of the digital library research group at ODU. The NCSTRL+ project and the  Interoperability project are providing the core technologies for UDLF and the TechEd project will provide course content.

We have placed the results of our work in a bucket - the fundamental digital object in NCSTRL+. The major components are a prototype toolset, a requirements document,  a baseline for future evaluations, and a report on content creation.