Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Sharing resources among colleagues: Building a Commit Wiki

 

By Geillan Aly

"We hope that the NE-Commit Wiki space will provide a means for instructors to share their individual efforts to help better the teaching practices of the collective. If you are a member of NE-Commit, we invite you to access the page and request access. Tutorials are provided for you to learn how to create your own pages and upload any materials you would like to share. Only if we work together, can we make large strides in advancing our own teaching practices, and thus better support our students." 

The Challenge

The New England Community for Mathematics Inquiry inTeaching (NE-Commit), one of the largest regional Commit networks (comathinquiry.org), has recognized the existence of a persistent challenge. We have acknowledged that the group collectively possesses significant untapped resources. Over the course of their careers, members of NE-Commit have created and refined lessons and assignments which center student inquiry in mathematics. However, access to these lessons has been purely individual and by happenstance, when two instructors connect to share resources and experiences. As careers end, the wisdom and efforts of senior instructors are lost; once an instructor retires, their created lessons are often filed away or never seen again. This follows a traditional challenge in education; instructors do not have a collective base from which to build, be inspired, or build upon. Generations of teachers are likely to have “rediscovered the wheel” many times over rather than building upon what came before.

Independently publishing materials online is one solution to this dilemma. Teachers can now upload their lessons for other teachers to reference and use. Information has now been decentralized and democratized. Thus, rather than being limited to expensive curricula distributed by large publishing houses, lessons can now be uploaded for anyone to access. Furthermore, sharing information online allows instructors to be progressive in their approach to teaching and respond to the latest findings in educational research. Consider that most published curricula and texts are still instructor-centered, which does not align with modern best practices. Furthermore, although addressing equity and social justice is recognized as being extremely important for support students’ success in mathematics, these ideas have not yet penetrated into traditional teaching resources. 

Publishing online provides an outlet for resources to be shared and for conversations to occur between instructors with a collective interest. This solution is not without its own challenges. The barrier to entry for many may be difficult. There are several challenges which need to be overcome. Creating and maintaining a stand-alone website takes precious time. Furthermore, not everyone has the knowledge to create a website, or the resources to host and secure it. If answer keys are to be provided, students must be prevented from accessing them, adding further requirements on instructors to limit access to their materials. Once a working site is created, there is nothing to help distinguish the signal from the noise. How will this obscure website be found by others among millions of search results? The burden on individual instructors who had taken the time to create lessons and resources was growing as they were now expected to host and market materials on their own.

Collaboratively Identifying Requirements

NE-Commit wrestled with the larger question of how to best share resources, while not adding a significant burden to anyone interested in sharing teaching materials. In the Spring of 2021, NE-Commit members were given an opportunity to share their wish list for an online repository for teaching materials at one of the regular NE-Commit teas, a space to meet collectively, socialize, and informally discuss topics at hand. Individuals who had lessons to share or who were interested in new resources contributed their ideal list of characteristics for a web-based repository where members of the NE-Commit community can upload teaching resources:  

  • Individuals should find the interface simple to use, with a low barrier to entry
  • The repository should be easy to navigate, with keywords or a search bar.
  • The repository should be secure so answer keys and other sensitive information is not readily accessible by the general public.
  • Commenting should be enabled to ask questions of the original author, share experiences teaching the lesson, provide ways in which the lesson was modified, etc.
  • Authors should be known members of the NE-Commit group so the source can be familiar. Most members acknowledged they were hesitant to use lessons found online written by an unknown instructor.
  • Creation and maintenance of this repository should not be taxing on any one individual as this is an uncompensated service to the group. Note: NE-Commit received funding from the larger COMMIT Network for a small grant which has provided some modest stipends to a few individuals involved in creating this repository. However, this stipend did not adequately compensate for the amount of time necessary to initiate and maintain this project.
  • The space should be formal and ideally provide analytics so efforts can be documented for promotion and tenure. 

 

A Team Taking the Inititative

Many online repositories and portals were considered to host this project including a shared Google Drive. Personally, I had many positive experiences with developing Wikis. I recognized that a Wiki Space could meet the needs of the group. The relative longevity of Wikipedia and other Wiki Spaces online meant that long-term viability of a Wiki Space dedicated to inquiry based math learning would also be likely.

A small group of NE-Commit members including Carly Briggs, Viktoria Savatorova, Moshe Cohen, Christine von Renesse, Volker Ecke, and myself formed in Summer of 2021. After testing and considering other formats for uploading and sharing information, we decided that a Wiki Space would indeed meet our needs. We launched https://iblwiki.org/ne-commit/ at the beginning of the Fall 2021 semester.

An Invitation for You

Members of the NE-Commit network are invited to request membership to this space. Currently, the Wiki has pages where individual members have a bio page which focuses on their mathematics teaching, and links to lessons they have created for others to access. This addresses the “familiarity question” wherein individuals may not have previously met, but can now see how a specific member has been active in NE-Commit and get an impression of their teaching perspective. Content can be searched by keywords in a search bar, or by content area which are recognized categories (used to group multiple articles by a common topic). Individuals can also look for lessons with a specific type of pedagogy in mind. Since Wikis are a community-maintained space, any member can edit a page, providing a way to include comments, questions, and alterations to any lesson. Maintenance of the site is a collective responsibility since all members have the ability to edit pages, however large-scale maintenance and accessibility can be coordinated by a select group of moderators.

Overall, we hope that the NE-Commit Wiki space will provide a means for instructors to share their individual efforts to help better the teaching practices of the collective. If you are a member of NE-Commit, we invite you to access the page and request access. Tutorials are provided for you to learn how to create your own pages and upload any materials you would like to share. Only if we work together, can we make large strides in advancing our own teaching practices, and thus better support our students.

 

Geillan Aly

 

Sharing resources among colleagues: Building a Commit Wiki

  By Geillan Aly "We hope that the NE-Commit Wiki space will provide a means for instructors to share their indivi...