SBIR-STTR Award

This SBIR project's innovation is a unique web-based authoring framework for creating animated interactive web content that replaces university-level STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) textbooks in traditional or online courses. The confluence of HTML5, cloud services, and ubiquitous portable devices enables widespread use of web-native content having engaging effective activities for students including animations, interactive simulators including mini-games, and self-assessments. Such content is difficult to develop/maintain in traditional publishing paradigms involving a small author/editor core team. A wiki-style crowdsourced approach, with oversight by an author/editor core team, is more scalable but web-based authoring tools support only limited content types like text or drawings. The project's intellectual merit lies in developing a novel web-based authoring tool for creating HTML5 code for animations, including a novel automated synthesis of the code from abstract restricted-form English-sentence specifications inspired by experiences in developing state-of-the-art automated circuit synthesis techniques. The merit also lies in a new repository of parameterized interactive simulations with potentially wide applicability in STEM fields. Results will include the initial tool and repository, plus use by instructors and graduate students from several universities to demonstrate crowdsourcing feasibility.

The broader/commercial impact of this project includes catalyzing a new partnering approach between a publisher and universities, striking a new balance between core-team authored content and crowdsourcing. A core author/editor team creates initial content and outlines needs, requiring less upfront investment, and the community adopts the content and contributes items under the core team's curation. Curated crowdsourced content can dramatically improve content and reduce creation/maintenance costs. The approach can expand to curated crowdsourced homeworks, automated grading, online help tools, quizzing services, student performance analysis, and more, unleashing synergy among universities to build common tools that benefit the community, a necessity made manifest due to drastic reductions in university budgets. The project's initial focus on computer science lower-division topics may yield company revenues of $5M in textbooks within a few years and $10M considering expanded services shifted from university to company, for CS alone, and $40M-$50M for multiple STEM disciplines. The addressable market for lower division STEM is $1B textbooks and $2B expanded services. The project's approach provides a practical strategy, with individual instructors initially adopting the content as a textbook replacement for campus-based or online classes, followed by possible expanded service arrangements made with departments/universities.

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.