Online Curriculum Planning Behavior of Teachers

Curriculum planning is perhaps one of the most important tasks teachers must perform before instruction. While this task is facilitated by a wealth of existing online tools and resources, teachers are increasingly overwhelmed with finding, adapting and aligning relevant resources that support them in their planning. Consequently, ripe research opportunities exist to study and understand online planning behavior in order to more generally characterize planning behavior. In this paper, we introduce a web-based curriculum planning tool and study its use by middle and high school Earth science teachers. We examine the web analytics component of the tool and apply clustering algorithms to model and discover patterns of the use within the system. Our initial results provide insights into the use of the tool over time and indicate teachers are engaging in behavior that show affinity for the use of interactive digital resources as well as social sharing behaviors. These results show tremendous promise in developing teacher-centric analysis techniques to improve planning technologies and techniques to study online curriculum planning patterns.