The central role of adaptation for curriculum enactment: designing educational software for adaptation of curriculum using digital library resources

Although educational digital libraries like the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) offer a multitude of pedagogically relevant digital resources, educators still require support in reusing these resources in their classroom teaching. This research emphasizes the role of curriculum adaptation as central to enabling resource 'reuse' and employs DLESE Teaching Boxes as examples of curricula supporting digital resource reuse. The questions guiding this research are as follows: (1) What adaptation processes and strategies do experts utilize in their planning for enactment (i.e. classroom implementation) of curriculum? (2) How can computational models of curriculum be designed to support these adaptation processes and strategies? (3) How does the use of the Teaching Box Builder application influence or support educators' adaptation processes and strategies? The outcomes of this work are a conceptual framework ENACT and the Teaching Box Builder application. ENACT ties expert educators' adaptation processes with general design requirements. These general design requirements inform the specific design features of the Teaching Box Builder application which supports educators' use and adaptation of Teaching Boxes. Teaching Box Builder utilizes the Federated Digital Object Repository Architecture (FEDORA) to model Teaching Box components and their relationships. This research employs a two-phase methodology with each phase successively informing the design of Teaching Box Builder application design. The conceptual framework ENACT resulted from an analysis of (a) frameworks describing digital library resource use and educators' knowledge management practices and (b) expert educators' adaptation processes as describes in the literature review and observed in the Teaching Box workshops. The second phase included a verbal analysis which explored educators' adaptation processes and which informed the design and implementation of the second version of Teaching Box Builder. In the evaluation study, educators completed adaptation tasks using the Teaching Box Builder while "thinking aloud".