Abstract. Open collaborative authoring systems such as Wikipedia are growing in use and impact. How well does this model work for the devel- opment of educational resources? In particular, can volunteers contribute materials of sufficient quality? Could they create resources that meet stu- dents’ specific learning needs and engage their personal characteristics? Our experiment explored these questions using a novel web-based tool for authoring worked examples. Participants were professional teachers (math and non-math) and amateurs. Participants were randomly as- signed to the basic tool, or to an enhanced version that prompted authors to create materials for a specific (fictitious) student. We find that while there are differences by teaching status, all three groups make contribu- tions of worth and that targeting a specific student leads contributors to author materials with greater potential to engage students. The exper- iment suggests that community authoring of educational resources is a feasible model of development and can enable new levels of personaliza- tion. p. 216

Over the last decade we have seen new development models that take ad- vantage of the openness of the World Wide Web. Encyclopedias, web browsers, computer operating systems, and other complex artifacts have been created by loose networks of volunteers building on each other’s contributions. These openly developed products often meet and sometimes exceed the quality of more cohe- sive sources and in general lower their costs. In education, there are a number of p. 216

Look this up! p. 217

We propose a four phase cycle of a new system for open resource development: Generation, Evaluation, Use, and Improvement. This study is an exploration into the Generation phase. Will volunteers produce materials of sufficiently high qual- ity that they can be put in the hands of students with little or no editorial over- sight? We report results obtained with a simple web-based authoring interface for worked example problems, a tutoring resource that is very intuitive and hence can be authored by lay volunteers. Worked example problems are versatile for com- puter tutoring systems. They can be presented to a student as a full problem and solution, as a problem with a partial solution, or as simply a problem, as on a homework sheet. In more intelligent tutoring systems, scaffolds contained within the problem can be faded as the student masters each skill. Because worked ex- ample problems enhance problem solving in intelligent tutoring systems, they also complement what already exists [8,9]. Pedagogically, worked-examples both in- struct and help to foster self-explanation [10]. Thus they are a useful educational resource, although we do not test their usefulness in this paper. p. 217