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Distributed Expertise in Teaching |
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Chair:
Lillian (Boots) Cassel, Department of Computing Sciences, Villanova
University, Villanova, PA 19085, USA (cassel@acm.org) Rapporteur: Deepak Kumar, Department of Mathematics & Computer Science, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010, USA (dkumar@brynmawr.edu) Participants: Anneke E.N. Hacquebard (The Netherlands), Richard J. LeBlanc, Jr., (USA), Jacob-Steen Madsen (Denmark), Claus Poulsen (Denmark), Joseph Regev (Israel) |
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Key words: Computer Science, Higher Education, Quality, Support Services, Teaching Materials
Abstract: We examine the nature and role of distributed expertise in support of teaching. We present possible models of organizing distributed expertise resources and also present several issues that arise when creating such resources. This paper represents discussions on continuing work on the area of distributed expertise. We conclude with a set of action items that may be adopted by the IFIP Work-ing Group 3.2 as a part of its future activities.
Introduction
Given the rapid advances in various disciplines it is sometimes difficult for faculty who regularly teach core courses to stay up-to-date and to effectively incorporate the recent advances into a course curriculum. In most instances it is to be assumed that faculty expertise will not cover all topics that form the core of a course. In fact, in a number of institutions in some countries, it is typically the case that faculty are required to teach courses outside of their area of expertise. In such instances faculty tend to rely on available texts and the course is defined by the content and organization of the text. Consequently, the success of the course is mostly dependent on the quality of the text and the ability of the instructor to effectively teach from it. There is a danger in this dependency because of the time required to produce and distribute texts. Texts can soon become outdated and faculty who must rely heavily on a text may be hesitant to abandon an aging one.
What is Distributed Expertise?
For our purposes, distributed expertise is a community in which levels of expertise vary and there is a willingness to share it. It can be a resource for teachers in a particular subject area that can be used to promote high quality education. A distributed expertise resource helps connect faculty with usable content, teaching methodologies, and contact with experts in the field. This type of community is supported both by face-to-face interactions at conferences and, increasingly, by access to resources on the Web. We envision the Web component to include at least the following:
It is important to emphasize that providing a distributed resource may not be just a matter of providing adequate content knowledge. It is equally important to provide guidelines for presentation and various ways to organize learning experiences in the context of a specific topic.
Means of Sharing Expertise
There already exist various support mechanisms that can help a teacher enhance the quality of education. Such resources also form the core of expertise available to a teacher and can be viewed as follows:
Peer-to-peer or local expertise: Most faculty currently practice sharing of materials amongst themselves. This can happen within the same organization/department, related local colleagues, and with the advent of the Internet and the web, among colleagues at different locations throughout the world.
Regional expertise: There have been several efforts where schools that form a regional consortium organize regional workshops and, in some instances, with the help of a shared-library system, even share course materials effectively.
National-level expertise: This is an extension of the above situation. There are always cultural and language-related issues in disseminating course materials. Regional and national level efforts form a proper context for providing usable expertise.
Global expertise: It is commonplace to share the latest advances very quickly with the rest of the world, both via the Web and at conferences and workshops. Global expertise helps facilitate easy transfer of domain knowledge in rapidly advancing disciplines. Several domain-specific conferences have started offering education tracks in order to keep teachers abreast of the latest developments. Another effort being undertaken is that of creating digital libraries on a subject-oriented basis. These could also serve as a valuable resource for teachers.
Modern communication and resource sharing mechanisms make possible new ways of assuring high quality education at locations where faculty expertise does not cover all topics appropriate to core courses. For example, in the case where the course is of a traditional format, local faculty with complete control over the content of the course, assignments, and expected performance will benefit from the availability of materials developed by others and from the support of experts in topic areas of the course.
It is well understood that there is a distinction between content knowledge and expertise in teaching. Expertise in teaching is reflective praxis: an interaction between content knowledge and the craft of teaching. While it may be easy to exchange or provide content knowledge over the Web, it is more difficult to share expertise in teaching. The above mechanisms are still needed in order to facilitate the latter.
Organizing Distributed Expertise
It is important to put some thought into the organization and administration of distributed expertise resources. Creating a distributed resource is a non-trivial task, and for it to be successful, it would undoubtedly involve several people, in addition to experts, and appropriate funding. We explored several models for organizing a distributed expertise resource. Next, we present a short discussion on some of these.
A Web-Based Portal
As mentioned above, a possible distributed expertise resource could be a Web-based portal that provides an entryway for teachers. Creating a distributed expertise resource should necessarily follow a thoughtful process that clearly identifies the structure of the main portal and how it incorporates the above facilities. There already exist several Web sites that provide content that would fall in any of the categories relating to course materials. It should be noted that the primary goal here is to provide support for teachers. Hence, such a resource would inherently differ from the now prevalent distance learning portals. We do recognize that there will be some overlaps and in some cases distributed expertise portals may very well serve the same role as distance-learning sites. However, the primary targets for delivery of distributed expertise portals will be teachers.
One could begin creating a distributed expertise portal by planning an exhaustive coverage on a particular subject. However, our experience suggests that teachers will be better served if such portals focused on immediate needs. In researching this issue for the case of a core computer science course (Computer Organization and Architecture), we have discovered that such a resource should begin by performing a study of the prevailing practice and identifying the burning pedagogical issues. Providing distributed expertise in support of the identified weakness should be the top priority though gradually such a resource would grow to incorporate a nearly complete coverage of the field of study.
A survey of the prevailing practice also yields a lot of useful information about the subject that should be incorporated in the portal. This provides a teacher, perusing the portal, with a good sense of the state-of-the-art in addition to what may already be available. For instance, by conducting a survey of Computer Organization and Architecture course, we were able to gather information about various texts, teaching environments, available software, lab toolkits, as well as several already existing courseware repositories. These will naturally form an integral component of the portal.
A distributed expertise resource should be customisable for each teacher’s needs. With the advent of web technology, it is possible to provide customized content. Faculty choosing to use a distributed expertise portal should be able to identify their areas of need so that a customized portal is presented that directly address their needs. We envision a distributed expertise portal to be organized as a content-centric resource that can then be customized by each teacher into a teacher-centric resource.
NetWork Dialog (NWD) Model
One specific model for creating distributed expertise is a portal based on the NetWork Dialog Model (NWD). In this model, the portal provides a list of covered topics and available experts where each expert maintains their own web page(s) containing all the information they are willing to provide. The portal should provide a search facility to quickly help locate relevant materials and links. The portal also provides a discussion forum.
Each expert’s page provides information about the expert (relating to the domain), tutorials and other resources contributed by the expert, e-mail address, links to their personal home page, and a list of their personal bookmarks preferably annotated for relevance.
In this model, each expert also maintains a personal Question & Answering section, and a set of short NWD dialogs. Each NWD dialog consists of several web pages, leading a user from page to page. The dialog is continued in e-mail messages, which in turn become web pages, enriching the dialog for the next user(s). See the URL, http://www.bgu.ac.il/me/regev for an example.
It is critical for such a distributed expertise resource to time-stamp all material. Care must be taken to maintain all provided resources and to keep all the links up-to-date.
An Open-Source Model
We highly recommend adopting an open-source model in creating distributed expertise resources. The ultimate purpose of such a resource is to improve the quality of education. An open-source model relies on the creation of a community working towards a common goal. Anyone should be able to contribute expertise to the resource. The open-source model also provides a built-in mechanism for maintaining a standard of quality. Members of the community review all materials submitted.
An open-source model may not necessarily be directly applicable to the creation of a distributed resource for teaching. Whereas an open-source community is typically involved in the creation and maintenance of a single object or artifact, it is inherently different from the kind of distributed expertise resource described above. A distributed resource for teaching contains all kinds of objects and artifacts that are contributed by several experts. However, by adopting one of the models discussed above, it would be possible to adopt an open-source idea so as to transcend some of the issues discussed above. More importantly, we wish to harness the sense of community that we recognize as a critical component to the success of a distributed resource. Our goal should be to aspire to be better teachers by developing a more collaborative way of learning and teaching.
During our discussions, the idea of an open-source text was also mentioned. An open-source text can be authored by several experts where each writes, maintains, and provides resources for a chapter in their area of expertise. We are aware of several attempts at such texts, but not cognizant of any success stories. Part of the reason may have to do with the accommodation of different presentation styles and learning experiences. A distributed expertise resource may very well be the model that can address this shortcoming.
Enlisting (Distributed) Experts
We recognize that a key component of the proposed portal is the availability of subject experts. Experts will be needed to provide tutorials and related content. Experts may also volunteer to be available to teachers (via e-mail or other means of communication) for assistance. Experts may also be required to maintain parts of the course content and to keep them updated.
In some instances, experts may simply provide their own educational material as is on the web and make it available to others. Seeing how others structure a course can be valuable to faculty at other institutions. We know of several regional as well as national efforts that have compiled such materials for specific disciplines. The library at Karolinska Institution (Sweden) has done this and soon it will be replicated at the Roskilde University (Denmark). Recently, MIT has initiated a ten-year project that would make available course materials for all of their offerings on the web. Such efforts require additional resources (the MIT project will cost over $100 million) and help of librarians and other staff. Availability of support staff can help encourage experts to provide their course materials.
Ownership Issues
Making one’s course materials and other kinds of expertise available for use for anyone raises issues of ownership, credit assignment, and intellectual property rights. Who owns the course materials developed by a faculty member? In some instances, it is the faculty member. Very often it is the institution or university where the faculty is employed. This may especially be true if the organization is providing staffing to support the posting of course materials through a library. Instances where third parties (like a professional organization) provide such portals, faculty may have to get clearance from their institutions and/or sign copyright releases to the hosting organization. These issues can become an impediment to finding volunteer experts.
Addressing Learning Paradigms
Experts may not be restricted to subject-matter experts. We recognize that other faculty colleagues could play the role of an expert. Such colleagues may be locally available, in some instances, or accessible via electronic communication. Additionally, delivery of any content also has to take into account various learning styles and learning environments (classroom-based, workgroup-based, laboratory-oriented, etc.). Increasingly, a number of the courses are becoming reliant on input from other disciplines. It should be the goal of any distributed expertise resource to extend into these areas.
Distributed Expertise and Textbooks
Textbooks tend to focus most on presenting content, since that is what they do well. However, in a rapidly changing field, the long production cycle of texts makes it difficult to provide completely up-to-date coverage. Thus a distributed expertise portal can supplement texts in two ways: providing additional content regarding recent advances in the area and pedagogical materials particularly designed to work well with the text. Some publishers have begun to provide one or both kinds of materials on text-related web sites. These publishers’ sites should definitely be included in the resources available from a distributed expertise portal.
Access Issues
How a distributed expertise portal is to be made accessible raises some interesting issues. The main purpose of such an aggregate resource is to help teachers. Does that imply that it should be protected from access by others? Especially students? Where such a resource is hosted could provide some help in this decision. Password-based access may sound like a reasonable solution; however, it is not necessarily possible to do so in some situations. In some instances it may not be necessary. Where such portals are hosted by a professional organization, access is controlled by membership to the organization. Controlling access invariably leads to ownership issues (discussed above). Experts may not be willing to contribute to a controlled resource (especially one that charges for access).
Concluding Remarks
We have presented a case for creating distributed expertise for teaching. The core idea underlying successful delivery of courses is that of the existence of a community of experts that are willing to provide materials as well as be available for assistance to faculty. We have begun to examine various models of organizing a distributed expertise resource. We have also listed several issues one has to take into account while creating such a resource. A number of details still need to be worked out and several other issues are yet to be examined. We thank IFIP Working Group 3.2 for facilitating this Professional Group and offer the following items for consideration by Working Group 3.2 as it plans its future activities:
Action Item #1
There are professional societies for various parts of a discipline. They hold educational seminars as well as conferences. The people who primarily teach are not always connected to the people who do research on a topic. The workshops and tutorials are held at the research conference where the people who teach and need more content help are not present. There are several national organizations that hold annual meetings to help facilitate an interchange of ideas and experiences related to the education. IFIP should be urged to support such expertise sharing in the topic areas at the international level.
Action Item#2
IFIP should help coordinate educational activities of various professional societies. This could be done by better and wider advertisement of various educational offerings for other professional societies’ activities as well as its own.
Action Item#3
IFIP should be aware of and offer active participation in the US National Science Foundation’s Digital Libraries Project (NSDL) and encourage the coordination of similar activities in other countries.
Action Item#4
Given the amount of effort required in planning and creating a distributed expertise resource, IFIP should to stimulate such work at the regional and national level by encouraging such efforts.
Action Item#5
IFIP should facilitate the continuation of this activity (i.e. exploration of the creation of distributed expertise for teaching) at conferences in the immediate future. The conference on Curriculum and Teaching Methods and Best Practices in Brazil would be a good place to bring together invited participants interested in this topic. Also, IFIP could facilitate further exploration of these ideas as a cross cutting activity within all its Technical Committees at the next World Computer Congress in Canada.