SBIR Phase I: EasyAuthor - An End User Authoring Tool for Open and Intelligent Technology-Enhanced Assessments.

This SBIR Phase I project will research the feasibility of a cloud-based, collaborative authoring tool to achieve an order-of-magnitude reduction in technical skills required to author technology-enhanced assessments (TEAs). Additionally, it will seek to advance the frontiers of TEA authoring beyond individual assessments to encompass the creation of personalized TEA pathways for diverse learners. The effort will explore novel technologies including a symbolic abstraction to enable visual design and implementation of complex programming constructs, and the representation of TEAs as "intelligent objects" interoperable with disparate and proprietary assessment platforms. This effort seeks to break the stranglehold of large organizations on a growing assessments market that marginalizes educators due to barriers of cost and technology skills. It will empower educators by making available easy-to-use tools that enable creation and sharing of open TEAs and TEA pathways to support deeper learning at scale, allowing educators to distribute TEAs in a classroom without being restricted by a proprietary assessment system, triggering the evolution of a peer-to-peer marketplace for teacher-created assessments. This disruption bears the potential to empower educator communities at scale and impact all learners in secondary and tertiary education settings through equitable access to quality assessments. This project will feature two distinctive innovations. The first is a visual programming environment with symbolic abstraction of complex programming constructs that are imperative for the design and creation of TEAs. This will enable intuitive authoring of complex TEAs by non-programmers (an impossibility today) and break down the biggest friction point for achieving access to TEAs at scale. The second is an open format for representation of TEAs as intelligent objects that are platform agnostic and "embeddable" in any assessment delivery system. This will facilitate distribution and usage of TEAs in browsers and thin client environments without the need for server side functionality mandated by proprietary systems. This will eventually break the stranglehold of proprietary assessment delivery systems that tie TEA access to their platforms. The project will pursue two primary research questions: How efficient and useful is the TEA authoring experience for non-technical educators? Are the TEAs effective in eliciting targeted reasoning and thinking processes? These research questions will help validate the technical feasibility of our innovative use of the proposed tool to enable easy TEA creation and distribution, and the efficacy of the complex TEAs created using the proposed project in providing evidence of target learning.