Essay: Transforming Teaching and Learning

Introduction

The creation of NSDL was motivated by a confluence of rapid advances in information and communication technologies, changes in educational practice, and a nationwide call to improve STEM education at all levels. The original vision for the National STEM Digital Library Program (National Science Foundation, 2000) was "to provide long-term support for maintenance, improvement, and expansion of high-quality digital science, mathematics, engineering, and technology materials for use by students and teachers at all levels."

From the very beginning, its planners envisioned NSDL as an online learning environment. It was to act as a gateway to a rich array of current and future high-quality educational content and services and a forum where content consumers could become content providers. NSDL would provide a nexus of resources and services in support of STEM education that would produce the foundation for transformative shifts in what and how we teach in the STEM disciplines (MacDonald et al, 2005).

This vision of networked learning, building communities, and creating and sharing knowledge has not changed in the decade of NSDL's existence. What has changed is a deeper and more nuanced understanding of (1) the socio-technical complexity of distributed, online learning; (2) the mismatch of timescales between technological and educational innovation; and (3) the roles that a vibrant, networked community of library builders and users can play.

In the years since that first request for proposals and the Pathways to Progress Report (Manduca, McMartin & Mogk, 2001), the technical, library, and education landscapes have undergone dramatic transformations. In this light, the initial educational goals of NSDL were laudable and ambitious, and, not surprisingly, also underestimated the complexities of the issues. It is fair to say, however, that NSDL made significant contributions to understanding issues surrounding technology integration to enhance teaching and learning at both the K-12 and undergraduate levels.

Evolving Educational Landscape

The educational landscape is rapidly evolving, and the instructor's role is constantly being redefined as new opportunities and challenges emerge. Twenty-first century learners increasingly expect and enjoy access to a wide variety of media formats and rich, personalized, online experiences. They expect school experiences to complement their online lives. The technical and social infrastructure afforded through the NSDL program enabled access to information, methodologies, and social networks that were previously inaccessible to most educators. Future development of large-scale instructional projects must simultaneously respond to and anticipate these changing conditions.

Teaching and Learning Capacities Generated through NSDL

Networked environments, coupled with a participatory web culture, have increasingly blurred the lines between content producer and consumer. Lack of access to information—the "digital divide"—is no longer a major concern for users, as it was when NSDL was conceived in the late 1990s. Today, it is easier to focus on linking the appropriate digital resources to the right user at the right time in increasingly personal and mobile learning contexts. As a networked repository, NSDL enables access to dynamic, media-rich, online resources to enhance instruction.

NSDL engages learners with realistic scientific practices and assessment.

NSDL provided a centralized context for undergraduate science instructors and K-12 teachers to learn about and explore 21^st century teaching and learning approaches. Primary among these strategies is an effort to increase opportunities for students to learn science through engagement in realistic scientific practices. NSDL fostered the collection, distribution, and use of resources that integrate research science and science education through access to scientific data and analysis tools, by organizing instruction to reflect research-like processes and by incorporating cutting-edge science findings into course content. Some projects also created opportunities for teachers and learners to interact directly with STEM professionals.

Show - Examples: Engaging Students with Scientific Practices and STEM Professionals

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NSDL identifies quality educational resources.

Although NSDL library-building efforts initially focused on finding and organizing resources, the need to identify resource "quality" emerged quickly. A tension arose in defining what constituted quality in different circumstances (Sumner, 2003), making it a challenge to find a balance between restricting collections' content to serve the needs of a particular group and the desire to support wide use by any teacher or learner.

BothNSDL.org and individual projects developed and tested a wide variety of approaches to address this challenge. For example, instructional resources in some NSDL collections were reviewed according to codified standards. These reviews commonly relied on criteria such as scientific accuracy, pedagogic effectiveness, and technical reliability. Social networking features let users add reviews or recommendations and help them select resources. Reviews can also serve as an instructional tool to disseminate information about the growing body of research on learning.

Show - Examples: Determining the Quality of Educational Resources

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NSDL provides tools for content consumers to become content creators.

NSDL supports rapid, continuous cycles of improvement of STEM content and the capacity of teachers to use it in innovative and transformative ways. NSDL projects in both K-12 and higher education provided a continuum of options for users to become creators by annotating or creating collections of existing content or by constructing new content from scratch.

The ability for teachers and learners to re-purpose resources in a number of diverse contexts is one of NSDL's most important contributions. Although a content creator may have targeted a specific learning goal, it is entirely possible that the same resource could be applied in novel and innovative ways in different domains and subject areas. For example, creative instructors could use a resource in a variety of new instructional settings defined by class level, class size, geographic location, or student learning styles.

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NSDL supports collaboration among diverse communities.

NSDL provided a supportive environment for collaborations among a diverse, scholarly community of educators. As a result, content specialists, curriculum developers, instructors, and experts in instructional technology worked together to identify, create, and adapt materials for different learning contexts in both K-12 and higher education. At least two aspects of NSDL were essential to supporting these cross-community collaborations:

• NSDL technology infrastructure and online tools made sharing different types of educational expertise much easier than ever before.
• The social connections needed to strengthen relationships across traditionally different groups took time to mature, and NSDL's decade-long duration and tight community structure provided that time.

NSDL integrates technology into teaching, learning, and professional development.

Often, the mere existence of digital resources inspired educators to take a fresh approach to designing learning activities and to convey concepts in new ways. NSDL continues to ease the use of technology by removing access barriers to digital materials and capturing metadata and paradata that reflect best practices for using a particular resource in the classroom. This relationship between research on teacher needs and the refinement of description and access approaches increased teachers' ability to focus on the task of instruction and may also have enabled them to employ innovative instructional approaches.

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NSDL supports personalizing learning through context and metadata.

Teachers often use search engines to find instructional resources, but they can become overwhelmed sorting through the deluge of information resulting from a browser search. Educational digital libraries focus on collecting and describing educational materials in ways that support their discovery in a more manageable stream. Resources are commonly discovered or developed by working groups or recommended by community members and then placed into meaningful contexts for users. Through this vetting process, NSDL has built confidence in the quality and utility of resources in their collections.

The idea that educational learning objects need specific descriptive structures was not new to NSDL, but NSDL's leadership in metadata generation and standards was integral to its ability to connect K-16 users with digital resources. The metadata, paradata, and technology infrastructures developed in NSDL projects have enhanced resource discovery and access to a range of media formats, as described in this report's Scaling Technology essay.

Digital libraries can also facilitate the discovery of resources that meet very specific user needs. Depending on the way a search engine describes and indexes a collection, descriptive metadata goes far beyond the traditional library metadata standards and can include enhanced resource types, alignment to standards, and educational level.

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NSDL shapes federal policy.

Larger trends affecting K-12 education created opportunities and challenges for the work of NSDL. NSDL could be seen as an outflow of the successful NSFNET project that catalyzed efforts to connect universities, schools, and libraries to the Internet. By 1998, educational policy began to emphasize the successful application of technology to learning, not just its presence in schools. Initiatives such as the federal Goals 2000 program, the ISTE National Educational Technology Standards (NETS), and Partnership for 21st Century Skills led to state and local requirements that couple technology expenditures with guidelines for effective classroom use. NSDL was able to build on these earlier efforts to influentially guide expectations for integrating digital resources for K-12 learning into and beyond STEM and to shape NSF RFPs that solicited projects to further enable such technology integration.

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Lessons Learned

Lesson 1: Context matters.

• Ensuring effective technology integration in teaching and learning settings (e.g., K-12 classrooms, museum field trips, undergraduate lab courses) requires a good understanding of the local implementation context such as (1) the level of technology infrastructure, support, and knowledge available; (2) the local policies and culture regarding technology and curriculum innovation; and (3) the motivation of the stakeholders.
• Developing a collection of digital content or an online tool also requires considering local needs and technical capabilities in concert to successfully create a working system. An effective design and development process is likely cyclical, and the process from conception to implementation takes a distributed effort over a long period of time.
• Digital STEM learning resources require contextualization to facilitate their discovery and use. Providing access to resources was the initial NSDL challenge, but access must be accompanied by support services and professional development opportunities to leverage change in instructional practice. Support services may be virtual (e.g., annotation, assessment, discovery search/browse services) or live (e.g., workshops) to help faculty effectively use the resources that are available.
• Effective use of instructional resources requires that other contexts and services be provided in areas such as scientific content, pedagogic approaches, assessment, and research on learning. Community input and contributions can result in comprehensive collections of teaching resources and methods for using them effectively.

Lesson 2: Provide quality resources first, complemented by discovery services.

• "Quality over quantity" should be the collection development motto for any educational collection. Time is a precious resource for educators. For these reasons, providing a limited set of targeted, contextually appropriate resources is imperative. In addition, the community needs to seriously consider and debate what constitutes "quality" in a variety of contexts.
• High-end discovery services should complement the quality collections. Educationally relevant metadata can help support effective resource discovery. However, as above, context matters, and automated techniques are emerging to complement and extend discovery, such as recommender systems and the collection and analysis of paradata.
• In the K-12 arena, educational standards are an important part of resource discovery and description, but standards linkages must be based on a match that goes beyond simple keywords. Determining whether a resource is relevant for teaching a certain standard requires matching concepts, which can be extremely difficult to achieve automatically.

Lesson 3: Foster a user community.

• Community-based design is essential to meet the needs, expectations, priorities, and possibilities of the many interests encompassed by the STEM disciplines.
• Community building is most fruitful when built on top of existing communities where potential participants are members, such as professional organizations. Building new communities requires focusing on emerging topics and diversifying interests represented in such existing communities.
• Communities need to share responsibility for defining and refining essential services. As an example, development of reviewed collections has proven to be both expensive and challenging. However, users desire and require rich descriptions that enable a variety of thoughtful, appropriate implementations, and authentic assessments must accompany tools, resources, and services. Planning for future facilities should anticipate the need for these services and budget time and resources appropriately.
• Projects need to be responsive to changing community needs and expectations. The NSDL Pathways structure is an example of how stewardship led to involved communities that participated in defining the scope of NSDL collections and the resources and standards needed to sustain teaching and learning in a specific domain.
• The development of thematic collections can be initiated and sustained through catalytic events such as workshops, communication networks, professional meetings, and a variety of professional consortia.
• Educators must have access to programs of continuous professional learning and development. Dissemination and outreach are essential to raise awareness of collections and must complement methods such as commercial search engine indexing. Professional development communities need to be able to link virtually and face-to-face. The power of bringing developers and users together in face-to-face events, such as the NSDL Annual Meeting, led to new synergies, collaborations, and implementation of new services.