Activities
The project team met by phone approximately monthly to explore how the teaching materials outlined in the proposal could be realized as a concrete set of web pages within the SERC content management system (CMS). Initial web spaces were set up and a series of prototype structures were developed, discussed and successively refined. This involved the design of the overall site and the organization of teaching materials, data and supporting pedagogic materials in a logical fashion.
The structure of the site was established such that it accommodates sets of instructions for individual tasks, along with overarching modules that each consist of several tasks. Each overarching module will contain a cover page that describes the learning goals, hydrologic concepts, and data types used in the lesson. This is an adapted version of the SERC ActivitySheet format that is widely used across the SERC sites. Within each lesson, instructional pages document particular steps that students would engage in (e.g. data collection from a specific source, specific data analysis procedure). These steps are collected in a pool of web pages.
Because certain steps are used in more than one context, paths through a particular sequence of steps can be created to fit a specific lesson or context. These paths will allow steps to be reused, reorganized and individualized across multiple activities. The use of variable paths through a fixed set of steps is a new approach to organizing teaching materials at SERC. We have outlined the development plan for a new set of tools within the CMS which will allow authors to identify and order the series of steps involved in a given activity. The system will then be able to present this series of steps to students with automatically-generated navigation elements leading students through that particular path.
Findings
The team is coming to a common understanding of how the vision in the proposal can be concretely realized in a website. Strong progress is being made on both the technical infrastructure and the initial development of the teaching materials. No major obstacles have been encountered.