CollectiveTeach: Crowdsourcing Lesson Plans

Lack of quality textbooks and good educational resources is a wellknown problem in developing regions. In this paper, we describe the design of CollectiveTeach, a web platform that aims to integrate rich educational content into an inquiry-based framework, viz. the 5E learning model, for generating web-annotated lesson plans for school and college teachers in developing countries. Given the wealth of educational resources on the Web, CollectiveTeach helps teachers to author new lesson plans through a simple web interface allowing them to easily search, select, order and collect educational content relevant to the topics they wish to teach. Œis paper describes our experiences building two versions of the CollectiveTeach platform. Œe initial platform was tested via a user study with a cohort of 19 teachers in Ghana and the learnings of this user study were incorporated in a second, improved version of CollectiveTeach; the current prototype of CollectiveTeach was evaluated using human experts for computer science subjects covered in standard undergraduate curriculum.