On the feasibility and utility of web based educational lesson plans

Abstract

The Web has a wealth of educational information across different topics, which can potentially be used to improve teaching. In an attempt to harness this potential we developed a Contextual Information Portal(CIP) for education and deployed it in schools in Kenya and India. The portal crawls the Web and tries to collect documents for different subjects and creates a repository of relevant information. In this context two very basic question arise: What is the quality of these online contents? and Can these educational web materials be effectively used to teach classes? Answering the former question is fundamentally hard since there exists no standardized measure for the utility of web-based educational resources. This paper aims to answer these two questions in this larger realm. First, using 6 expert teachers, we study the content quality problem from a teacher's perspective of whether there exists sufficient information on the Web to teach classes pertaining to the school syllabus. To investigate the second question, we accepted the help of an expert teacher. Evaluations were based on her feedback after creating lesson plans using the CIP for grade 8 mathematics and taught several classes in an after-school program. We found that in general, the Web has sufficient number of high-quality contents and lesson plans obtained from the CIP are useful in teaching a class.