Empowering Instructors to Become Effective Content Curators: Using the Building Blocks of Today to Manage Dynamic Curriculums for the Education Space

This paper will examine key technologies that exist in the market today which can be used to enable instructor content curation and idea growth through direct student collaboration. Existing tools can be used to not only recreate the in-class collaborative experience in a distance-learning environment, but can also be used to support growing collections of knowledge on topics/subjects than just what can be gained from a single class or semester. This paper envisions a method for both instructors and students to help them effectively curate content and helps empower them to communicate through references to a combination of text and digital media. These references originate from multiple platforms across the Web, but relate to a single topic or idea. This “compilation” of material can then be treated as its own form of content and can be assignable, consumable, and gradable in the well-established pedagogy of standard learning management systems. This form of content would allow instructors or students to present ideas that are greater than the sum of their individual parts and provide a platform for further discussion and learning, ultimately, growing the value of the content itself