A Framework for Textbook Enhancement and Learning using Crowdsourced Annotations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a crowdsourced annotation platform called CAS that enables students, instructors, and authors to collaboratively improve educational content through in-context annotations, enhancing learning and content quality.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel crowdsourced annotation system that facilitates iterative content improvement and student engagement through in-context annotations and community collaboration.

Findings

Students found CAS highly useful for learning.

Participants expressed willingness to use CAS for future learning.

Experiment showed positive satisfaction and engagement with the system.

Abstract

Despite a significant improvement in the educational aids in terms of effective teaching-learning process, most of the educational content available to the students is less than optimal in the context of being up-to-date, exhaustive and easy-to-understand. There is a need to iteratively improve the educational material based on the feedback collected from the students' learning experience. This can be achieved by observing the students' interactions with the content, and then having the authors modify it based on this feedback. Hence, we aim to facilitate and promote communication between the communities of authors, instructors and students in order to gradually improve the educational material. Such a system will also help in students' learning process by encouraging student-to-student teaching. Underpinning these objectives, we provide the framework of a platform named Crowdsourced Annotation System (CAS) where the people from these communities can collaborate and benefit from each other. We use the concept of in-context annotations, through which, the students can add their comments about the given text while learning it. An experiment was conducted on 60 students who try to learn an article of a textbook by annotating it for four days. According to the result of the experiment, most of the students were highly satisfied with the use of CAS. They stated that the system is extremely useful for learning and they would like to use it for learning other concepts in future.