Scaffolding of scientific publications with open educational resources (OER)

Abstract

Helping students better understand scientific publications is one of the essential tasks of higher education. This paper presents a novel learning/reading environment that incorporates innovative scaffolding methods that aim to enable students to readily access open educational resources (OER) and read and comprehend the paper in a collaborative reading environment within a course. The new system, OER-based Collaborative PDF Reader (OCPR), captures and characterizes students’ emerging information needs when they read a paper, while also auto-recommending high quality OERs, e.g., presentation videos, slides, or Wikipedia pages, when students ask for clarifying content (OER-based Scaffolding). The study was conducted in a course for students to read an article, ask questions, and rate resources suggested by the OCPR system. The preliminary results show that the students tend to ask elementary questions and rate video resources higher than other resources. The results will inform future improvement of the OCPR system.