The UCWISE (University of California Web-based Instruction for Science and Engineering) project aims to provide technology and curricula for experimental laboratory-base courses in university level computer science and engineering. The project seeks to create an innovative approach to computer science instruction that leverages the strengths of information technology and current research in education. This project is funded by CITRIS (www.citris-uc.org ) and NSF (National Science Foundation). The UCWISE learning tools are currently used by three courses at UC Berkeley (CS3, CS4, and CS61B) and one course at UC Merced.
The current Instructor Portal of the UCWISE system is functional, however it is not user-friendly.The goal of our project UC-HIPO ( UC Help for Instructor Portal) is to provide a formal usability analysis and design for the one of the components in Instructor Portal called the "metadata tagging and delivery" tool. We will propose a user-centered design for the metadata interface. The "metadata tagging and delivery" tool will assist the instructors of UCWISE in tagging their curriculum content with metadata and thus facilitate fast and easy categorization, retrieval, reuse, and sharing of information related to the curriculum and the study material. The metadata will also help the UCWISE researchers to gather data used for writing grant proposals.
Metadata tagging can be a time-consuming and tedious effort. Given the demanding schedule of UCWISE instructors, their desire to tag up the curriculum material with metadata to benefit the future usage of curriculum often gets compromised by their urgent need to author and prepare the curriculum material for the next teaching session. Our metadata tool user interface design effort is aimed at designing tools that allows instructors to tag their curriculum material with metadata and use the metadata as conveniently, quickly and seamlessly as possible.