Computing at UW-MadisonDivision of Information Technology
Students Faculty/Staff Services Services A through D Services E through L Services M through R Services S through Z Help Desk Tech Store About DoIT   

TAs drive development of a teaching tool

Monday, January 28, 2008


Italian 101 Trasure Box, a crate full of files.They called it the "Treasure Box." The plastic milk crate in the Department of French and Italian teaching assistants' office held manila folders filled with lesson plans, quizzes, and other resources created over many semesters by TAs. Now, two years later, it's been replaced by L&S LessonShare, an online tool that enables a community of TAs to store, use, search on, comment on, and improve an important instructional resource.

The Italian Department's TA Treasure Box was loosely organized and suffered from the memory lapses of those who borrowed the treasures and failed to return them. Updating the box's paper materials was troublesome and erratic.

Other departments relied on similar informal resource collections, while some were beginning to make materials available in digital form. The Department of German had such an online resource, and Mike Olson, a German TA, had ideas about improving it. In 2006, relying on his background in technology and database design, Olson envisioned a dynamic online file cabinet that would enable TAs to store and share materials and make them easily searchable for use by others. As often happens, his ideas germinated.

Doug Worsham and Sue Weier of Learning Support Services (LSS) in the College of Letters and Science were thinking along the same lines. Collaborating with Olson, they worked over the next 18 months to develop LessonShare. Part of their work was supported by an Impact Award from DoIT's Engage program.

LessonShare is more than a simple online repository of information. "Most people think of a repository as a place to store finished documents" says Worsham, an Instructional Technologist in LSS. "LessonShare not only enables you to store materials, it offers a platform for sharing, discussing and improving those materials."

screenshot of lessonshare

"TAs drove the development of LessonShare," says Weier, an LSS Instructional Technologist. "Lots of individual TAs would create lesson plans and activities. As TAs came and went, those resources were put in a file cabinet somewhere and fell out of sight."

"It was a mess," she continues. "TAs felt that valuable resources were being missed. LessonShare was an effort to capture and reuse them, to save institutional memory."

The key to LessonShare was organizing the information and making it accessible. Its classification schemes make documents easy to find. Plus, departments can adapt the structure of LessonShare to suit their own needs.

Using LessonShare in your department

Any college or department can set up its own LessonShare on a local server. Doug Worsham and Sue Weier of Learning Support Services in the College of Letters and Science say they are eager to help others on campus make use of this new online teaching tool. Most current LessonShares are in L&S, but the adaptability of the tool would make it useful in other settings, say the LessonShare developers.

For information, contact Doug Worsham at doug@lss.wisc.edu or Weier at sue@lss.wisc.edu

"LessonShare is a grassroots tool," Weier explains. "TAs can add files and tag them, and the files are then searchable on the tags and the full text. But departments are free to impose their own levels of control and approval on the materials as they desire."

Browsing is a key feature of LessonShare. "You can drill down into the files with greater levels of specificity," says Worsham. "You keep applying filters to locate specific lessons or materials."

With LessonShare's commenting features, TAs can share their experiences with various lessons and suggest revisions and improvements. When students notice a mistake in a quiz, TAs can correct it and update the version in LessonShare. "Those sorts of things used to die in the TA office," says Worsham. "Now, they don't have to."

"LessonShare gives the community of teachers a place to share their wisdom, creativity, and experience with others, making us all better, more efficient teachers," says Olson. "It also gives teachers more control over their teaching resources, so it empowers the community."

Weier, Worsham and Olson hope to improve on LessonShare's look and feel. They are also investigating the possibilities of a Web portal for TAs that would provide information on social, professional, financial and academic issues.

For now, they are all pleased with the growing use of LessonShare. "It preserves important instructional resources and allows them to be further developed and improved," says Worsham. "It enables instructors to explore alternative approaches and have a conversation about what works in the classroom."

For more on information, go to lss.wisc.edu and search on LessonShare.