Project CuRL: A Curricular Resource Library
CuRL stands for Curricular Resource Library. Project CuRL is a one-year experiment in using the web for collaboration in the development of an on-line resource for faculty and librarians to share information about and help make more usable web resources for use in college-level courses.
Overview
A major obstacle to the adoption of networked-based instruction is the lack of effective methods for finding those primary source materials that may already be in digital form but are not easily located using traditional search methods. Project CuRL seeks to address this problem through the collaborative development of a Curricular Resource Library that will be co-developed by faculty, librarians, and IT staff from five residential, primarily undergraduate institutions: Connecticut College, Dartmouth College, Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and Williams College.Objective
The objective of Project CuRL is to reduce inefficiencies in time and network resources required to make effective use of multimedia and internet resources in curricular development. To do this, we intend to develop a systematic method for describing, storing, and retrieving links to pedagogically useful internet resources, implementing the newly developed standards of the Instructional Management System, a national initiative sponsored by Educom to integrate the use of metadata to improve the quality of search engines in discovering pedagogically sound internet resources. While the development of these resources will be closely tied to specific curricular initiatives, the overall design will be towards enabling re-use of materials within multiple instructional and institutional contexts.We propose to accomplish this through two specific initiatives: 1) a competitive grant program that will fund faculty initiatives to create cooperatively managed collections of internet resources and 2) the design and development of a multi-media and link database to enable the re-use of materials developed through the faculty curriculum development grants.
I. Faculty Grant Program
The Faculty Grant Program is designed to provide faculty with release time and technical resources (software and support) to develop the ability to identify and integrate pedagogically sound internet resources (networked databases, electronic text and image collections) and internet tools (bulletin boards, newsgroups, conferencing, mailing lists) into their teaching. The goal will be to identify areas of significant overlap of content and organization for a particular course on all five of the campuses, and to then have the faculty share in the populating of the database of internet resources relevant to the topics of their courses. The technical and library staffs of the participating institutions (Wesleyan University, Connecticut College, Trinity College, Williams College, Dartmouth College) will meet early on in the project to identify likely areas of both subject overlap and facutly willing to participate in a technologically-intensive project. During the summer and fall of the project, the faculty would work collaboratively both with one another and with the other members of the project team to identify and catalog the resources required for their courses, which would then be stored in a link database. The five courses on the five campuses would then be taught during the spring.
The results of the Grant program will be 5 courses on a single topic that share the resources that are developed collaboratively.
II. Link Database
The underpinnings of the entire project lie in the design and population of a database that would contain the necessary information about the internet resources discovered during the course of the development of the courses funded through the faculty grant program. The database would follow the proposed structure of the Instructional Management System (IMS , see http://www.imsproject.org ) , and would be a shared resource for use by all collaborating institutions. Wesleyan would host the database, which we imagine would be built in Oracle, a powerful client-server relational database.
The result of the link database will be a technology that will outlive the life of the project and will serve as a basis for further collaboration and sharing of vetted information among the institutions, which can be expanded both to cover broader topics, and to enable new institutions to participate in its maintenance and growth.
Specific Changes in Operations, Instruction, and Services
Project CuRL will provide a fundamental resource for faculty wishing to use the Internet in their teaching. Through their cooperative addition of new resources to the link database, we imagine that one of the major obstacles to the use of the web in teaching will be significantly reduced. In particular, the by-products of Project CuRL will include:
- A central repository of links to internet resources that will reduce redundancy of effort by faculty and library staff to both discover and vet internet resources
- Enforced cataloging standards that will improve student and faculty access to resources for use in and out of the classroom
- Increased faculty awareness of the capabilities of networked resources
- Encouragement and time for faculty interested in innovation and the exploration of the possibilities of using networked resources in teaching.
- Improved inter-institutional sharing of ideas and methods by faculty, library, and technical personnel.
Efficiences and Cost Savings
Our experience in supporting early efforts to use the internet in teaching is that faculty report that the activity of developing and maintaining a vibrant course web site consumes far more time in preparation than does teaching using traditional methods. One of the major goals of Project CuRL is to reduce the effort required to use technology in teaching to make it more in line, if not more efficient, than not using technology in teaching.
We anticipate enjoying these new efficiencies
Scope
Our plan is to do one faculty project at each of the five campuses. We see the benefits of this project going directly to the faculty, and their students, and indirectly to the peers of the faculty participants, as well as to the library and technical staff involved. We imagine the project having either direct or indirect instructional impact on roughly 50 people at each campus.
Replication
While we are certainly interested in the long-term maintenance of the particular databases that we develop, and believe that the database of curricular materials that we create for the particular courses we support will be of value to the individual faculty who participate in the project, we believe the real value outside of the participating colleges lies less in the actual technology developed and more in the lessons learned about the best way to mediate between the value of a centralized database and the idiosyncratic uses of media and networked resources within the context of instruction. The particulars of how we solve the problem are likely to be less interesting than whether the value of a database-driven approach to managing curricular content is cost-effective.
Plan of Work
As outlined above, we anticipate the project beginning in the spring of 1998, and to culminate in five courses being taught during the spring of 1999, and speakers giving talks and workshops during the fall of 1998 and the spring of 1999.
Spring 1998
Identify potential faculty participants from the five campuses.
Database design. Meeting of project staff. Design detailed
assessment plan.
Summer 1998
Award grants; populating of database begins. Meeting of project
staff and faculty. Survey faculty about methods of preparing and
delivery instruction both by traditional and internet-based
methods.
Fall 1998
Continued population of database. Observe changes in preparation
methods enabled by database, and by collaborative effort.
Spring 1999
Courses taught. Survey faculty through-out concerning preparation
and delivery methods. Survey students about experiences before,
during, and after.
Summer 1999
Database improvements; assessment of results; compilation of
survey results.
Assessment of Efficiencies
Our assessment plan, to be developed during the spring of 1998, will seek to provide useful insights into the following questions, which are fundamental questions about the value of networked information in higher education. Through observation, surveys, focus groups, and interviews, we hope to gain insights into the following : Can faculty cover material more thoroughly using internet resources as a component of their teaching? Can students otherwise not fully engaged in learning be engaged using these new methods? Can faculty produce curricular materials more efficiently using internet tools and resources than they do using traditional methods? Can the benefits of smaller courses be reproduced in larger courses through the use of these technologies? What pedagogical effects are lost by using technology in teaching? What are the transferable skills that students gain when their courses involve the use of internet tools and resources? What skills don't they gain that they used to gain in 'traditional' courses? Are these new methods, once rationalized, in fact more effective than traditional methods? What are the categorically new educational effects enabled by the use of internet tools and resources? Less grandly, what is a reasonable, functional model for the interaction of faculty, library, and IT staff that will enable this new method of education to be better and more cost effective than the methods it is replacing?
Last Updated 20 March 1998