Section 2 Proposed Activities
Salary support is requested for Summer 2022 to support the below activities. While the applicant has existing support for one month's salary from the NSF, this support is primarily intended to support the content development of the TBIL Resource Library [17] (i.e. authoring and editing classroom activities), not its underlying technologies. Additional support is requested in order to provide the applicant bandwidth to spend the full summer further developing the described technologies while preparing a new NSF grant proposal dedicated to cyberinfrastructure that supports undergraduate mathematics education.
Subsection 2.1 FOSS Cyberinfrastructure for Mathematics Instruction and RUME
After preliminary development for two years for Clontz's personal use, the CheckIt Platform received its first public release in June 2021. Two dozen instructors participated in an introductory authoring workshop, and as of August 2021 randomized exercise banks have be published or are in development for calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, introductory statistics, quantitative reasoning, and mathematics for liberal arts courses, many of which will be used to facilitate Fall 2021 instruction. This quick evidence of productivity witnesses the utility of the platform, and it has also generated many requests for new features and bugfixes.
An alpha version of the Scratchee app for creating and sharing virtualized scratch cards for IF-AT was released in late July 2021. This prototype was created in response to developments related to Clontz's NSF grant for supporting Team-Based Inquiry Learning; while physical IF-AT cards are not incredibly expensive, they introduce logistical friction for implementing TBIL (ordering the cards, waiting for shipment, aligning multiple-choice questions with the predetermined correct responses printed on the card). Multiple TBIL instructors are using Scratchee in Fall 2021; their experiences will be used to determine the necessary enhancements required for a public release of the platform for the broader Team-Based Learning community.
Beginning in Summer 2020, Clontz partnered with Prof. Oscar Levin to develop PreTeXt-CLI, a command-line user interface for quickly generating PreTeXt template projects, authoring new materials, and publishing them to freely available internet hosts. AIM provided support for Clontz and Levin to continue this work in Summer 2021, and in August 2021 the PreTeXt-CLI became the canonical interface for authoring textbooks and research manuscripts in PreTeXt. The CLI is significantly simpler to install and use compared with previous tools; however, more work remains to integrate the tool with the VS Code graphical web application, with the ultimate goal of creating an elegant web browser-based authoring experience akin to using Google Docs or Overleaf, but producing documents accessible by both sighted and blind students. Additionally, there have been requests to directly integrate the CheckIt Platform into the PreTeXt ecosystem, allowing textbook authors to directly create randomized exercises for the end of each section.
Subsection 2.2 External Grant-Seeking
The work described above is well-aligned with the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Education and Human Resources [20] NSF solicitation. Clontz is currently funded as part of an IUSE program on Team-Based Inquiry Learning, and served as a consultant for another IUSE program studying the use of open-source textbooks in undergraduate mathematics education, particularly those authored in PreTeXt. With the college's support, Clontz will have the bandwidth to submit a new IUSE proposal focusing on the cyberinfrastructure needs of these projects and related RUME work.
An advisory board including mathematicians, mathematics education researchers, and a biology instructor from several external institutions have already agreed to collaborate on this project, with the aim of creating free techonlogies for the use in mathematics (and more generally STEM) classrooms, along with evidence that they improve undergraduate student learning.