Building an Online Educational Community for Algorithm Visualization Cliff Shaffer Virginia Tech Susan Rodger Duke University Tom Naps University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Steve Edwards Virginia Tech

Two Audiences Algorithm Visualization community People interested in building online educational communities

AVs: The Problem AVs have high faculty and student favorability ratings But most faculty don’t use them much in courses

Informal Survey Results Warning: Self-selected responders Are AVs useful? ◦ Strongly Agree: 12 ◦ Agree: 17 ◦ Neutral: 1 A majority indicated that they used some sort of visualization with class

Survey: Impediments to Use Lack of knowledge/time to find good AVs: 13 Time to make good AVs: 2 Difficulty integrating in class: 9 Lack of time within class constraints: 2 Uncertainty about quality outcomes: 1 Content not relevant to my classes: 1

AVs: The Solution is Community ◦ Build a community of users/developers ◦ Better disseminate best practices information Project Support ◦ NSF CCLI grant ◦ NSF NSDL grant ◦ Connections to NSDL/Ensemble project

AlgoViz.org A collection of links to over 500AVs Annotated bibliography of over 100 papers Forums, field reports OpenAlgoViz

Phase I: The Passive Side What problem do we solve here? ◦ Information? We provide that (to a limited degree) Nearly done!

Phase II: The Active Side Create a new model of “dissemination” to lower barriers to access Move away from the “digital library” model of users coming to collections Notification ◦ Can be via social networks Focus on “community-driven” content development ◦ Discussion, review, ratings ◦ Think Amazon, but we have critical mass issues

Building Online Educational Communities How are we similar or different from other (potential) online educational communities? ◦ Stakeholders: Practitioners, Researchers, Students ◦ Artifact assessment ◦ Best practice defined by community

Stakeholders: The AV community Students Visiting as part of their work in a course Visiting on their own

Stakeholders: The AV community Instructors who want to incorporate AV into their course ◦ As lecture aid ◦ In lab exercises/assignments in which the work of their students do with the AV is assessed by: Instructor or TA By the AV tool interacting with online DB

Stakeholders: The AV community Instructors who want to author content to help provide “context” for AV ◦ Lab exercises and assignments ◦ Hypertextbooks ◦ These stakeholders do not want to create AV – just content that helps students learn from it more effectively ◦ Is there some way of “recognizing” or “reviewing” what they do?

Stakeholders: The AV community AV Developers

Stakeholders: The AV community What advantages could AlgoViz offer each of these stakeholders? How could AlgoViz foster links between them that would allow them to leverage off of what each is doing?

Community Participation How do we increase participation? ◦ Using and contributing ◦ Nominations and voting This round ◦ Some simple (applet), Others download, install Next round? ◦ Videos? 3 min? YouTube? What would it take to get you to vote?

Recognition Importance – promotion/tenure/credit Example of another award ◦ NEEDS Premier award for Excellence in Engineering Education ◦ All of Engineering, Extensive courseware AlgoViz.org awards ◦ A way to get recognition for Algorithm Visualizations

Your Turn How are we doing? What do you need?

AlgoViz Awards Community-building exercise Solicited votes from the public on a slate of nominees Six winners Hall of Fame: 6+1