SBIR Phase II: Developing a web-based authoring framework for animated interactive university STEM web content via curated crowdsourcing

This SBIR Phase II project develops a new web-based publishing paradigm that creates interactive learning content for university-level science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. The interactive content, featuring animations, interactive question sets, and online tools, along with some text, may replace or enhance traditional textbooks, with studies showing significant improvements in student engagement and learning outcomes. The project addresses the nationwide high dropout rates of STEM students, due in part to outmoded learning materials. Such dropout rates not only prevent students from achieving their career goals, but result in a shortage of college graduates in nationally-critical STEM fields. The project creates novel web-based tools that empower teachers, and even students, to straightforwardly contribute new interactive content, thus tapping the latent talent and energy of many thousands of people. The project creates automated and human-overseen processes that efficiently and effectively percolate the highest-quality contributions to the top of lists, enabling content to be created and maintained at large scale and low cost. The project's new publishing paradigm can disrupt the existing publishing industry. The interactive quality content can increase the number of students who successfully graduate in STEM fields, which can strengthen the nation's economy and competitiveness. The project develops a new web-based content authoring and delivery framework that supports a novel curated-crowdsourced publishing paradigm. The framework tightly integrates collaborative web-based authoring with delivery of animated interactive web-based content. The project develops elegant tools for instructors, and even students, to contribute new interactive items. Such tools include a novel browser-based animation creation tool, which allows powerful animations to be easily and quickly created via any web browser without requiring application installation or requiring extensive tool training. The project creates and tests new processes that, via a combination of peer evaluations, usage data, and assessments, automatically percolate quality contributions to the top, for final curation by instructors, authors, or editors. Such percolation crowdsourcing can yield superior learning materials, at scale and cost-effectively, while simultaneously yielding substantially lower prices than traditional textbooks.