Scaling Collaborative Learning: Using the Community Digital Library to Enrich Course Content

The ability for a student to discover and learn from online material outside of a course's core curriculum is critical for generalized understanding. However, such a process is often limited by various factors, including efficiency, redundancy, feasibility, and a lack of domain knowledge. We propose to optimize this discovery process and facilitate student collaboration in seeking online information relevant to the course by leveraging the Community Digital Library (CDL) as a tool for enabling students and instructors to enrich course content by collaboratively indexing, searching, and discovering course-related webpages. As a collaborative learning tool, the CDL also enables instructors to identify topics in the lectures that should be improved over time. We report promising preliminary results using CDL for a graduate course.