SBIR-STTR Award

This SBIR Phase I project will determine how a system can be developed that replaces second-language textbooks with an intelligent, personalized solution that delivers custom content directly from teacher to student. This system would address challenges posed by low student engagement, high material costs, a need for personalized learning, and a lack of content availability on mobile devices. It will be the first platform to apply open educational resources (OER) to second-language acquisition at scale. This affords an opportunity to observe OER adoption and to understand the dynamics of mulch-author collaboration, forking and merging projects, and editorial systems for maintaining quality. The system could transform the field from a closed system driven by top-down publishing processes into an open system that is more responsive to the evolving needs of educators and students. This will reduce material costs, increase content availability (particularly in critical languages), and enable customization of materials to each program model, class and individual student, thus improving learning efficacy. Educators will also be able to collaborate on large-scale course development projects and share back to the education community. Other fields, including math, science and social studies may be able to utilize a similar system, if proven feasible.

This SBIR Phase I project will result in a cloud-based platform for second-language learning content that aims to disrupt the current publishing model and produce a transformation in how teachers teach and how students learn. It will empower the community of language educators to contribute content to a shared repository that all may reuse, revise or remix in their own lessons, units and courses using the clone-fork-merge methodology widely used in software development. It further enables rapid deployment to mufti-platform learning environments, including mobile devices, and integration with education information systems. As proven by open-source software, the creativity unleashed by massive-scale collaboration can increase content availability at a faster pace than top-down publishing can -- and at a lower cost and with a far greater degree of flexibility and customization. The Phase I research goals are to measure student and teacher engagement, impact and commercial viability. Researchers will indirectly observe 1,000 beta users' anonymous behavior over 4 months and measure non-personal data, as well as solicit survey responses from a sub-group of participating educators. By analyzing aggregate public behaviors that are minimally influenced, researchers aim to simulate the dynamics of a robust open education community.

This Phase II project aims to help address the achievement gap for English Learners, who consistently average 21% below native English speakers on reading scale scores starting in 4th grade and are twice as likely to drop out of school. Eighty percent of teachers believe that materials for English Learners are sub-standard, which contributes to this gap. The project provides an online crowd-authoring and sharing platform that gives K-6 language teachers the tools to meet their unique instructional needs on demand. It is the first and only platform to enable practicing teachers to rapidly build digital language lessons and interactive games that align to their specific requirements, without any technical know-how. The platform provides built-in rich media resources that adhere to best practices based on the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. Any teacher may access these open educational resources at no cost, provided they make their own creations available for public reuse, revision and remixing. The project seeks to understand the dynamics of collaboration and quality assurance for interactive content at a massive scale. Crowd-authoring can invest educators with the power to transform language learning into a field that is highly responsive to the evolving needs of educators and learners.This Phase II project will pioneer mass customization of interactive games and media in the field of second language acquisition. The project aims for teachers to create 175,000 custom digital lessons and interactive games using media resources provided by the project. Phase II will develop four new types of games that improve language acquisition using audiovisual experimentation, realtime chat with artificial intelligences, and a new technology that transforms visuals and narratives composed by students into grammatically accurate text and audio. Phase II will integrate these innovations into a crowd-authoring and quality assurance system capable of scaling to 100,000 new teacher-made learning objects per month. By giving language educators tools to rapidly create, share and customize content to meet their precise needs, the project seeks to significantly improve learning outcomes. Phase II will implement real-time formative assessment reports for teachers to evaluate student experiences and issues with the custom teacher-made interactive content. A controlled full-year, multi-site educational impact study will measure whether the project affects vocabulary acquisition, comprehension, grammar and sentence formation, and whether any skill gains transfer to other contexts. It will also reveal deep data insights about the process by which K-6 students acquire a second language.