History
and Future Plans
History
The
I-MINDS prototyping process was initiated in September
2002 using a National Center for Information Technology
in Education (NCITE –www.ncite.unl.edu) Seed Grant,
which allowed us to build a prototype software package
and conduct preliminary experiments to evaluate the technical
correctness and educational feasibility of I-MINDS. NCITE
is a research center located at the University of Nebraska
(UNL) and operated jointly by the College of Education
and Human Sciences, Nebraska Educational Telecommunications,
and the Computer Science and Engineering Department. The
prototype was developed and built in Java.
In
May 2003, we conducted a pilot study. The system was used
by subjects in a controlled experiment to assess what
impact it had on student learning of Global Information
Systems (GIS) content. GIS technology can be used for
scientific investigations, resource management, and development
planning. Tables 2 and 3 document the key specifics of
the pilot study. On Day 1, subjects in both groups completed
a 109-point pretest of the content that was to be taught
during the two sessions. At the conclusion of the class
on Day 1 for both groups, the subset of 60 items that
related to the content of that class was included on the
posttest. After the Day 2 instruction, the subset of 49
items that related to the content of that class constituted
the posttest. Subjects in the control group learned the
identical content during each of the two sessions, as
did subjects in the experimental group. The difference
was that the control group students were in the same room
as the instructor. Their class was taught in a very traditional
manner with the professor using PowerPoint slides identical
to those used for the experimental group to teach the
content. Results for the two testing sessions are encouraging.
For Test 2, the amount that the I-MINDS group improved
from the pretest to the posttest was nearly twice that
of the control group. Comments from the university professor
who used I-MINDS in teaching both of the content lessons
were also encouraging. He indicated that the teaching
tool was very easy to learn and use. The instructor also
noted that questions asked of him via I-MINDS tended to
be higher quality, reflect a deeper understanding, and
demand a richer response than those questions posed during
the control sessions.
In
the summer of 2004, we founded the company I-MINDS, LLC.
In
January 2005, we received National Science Foundation
(NSF) funding through the Small Business and Innovation
Research (SBIR) program.
In
May 2005, we received funding from Microsoft ConferenceXP
Program through the University of Nebraska.
Future
Plans
We
are currently expanding our company as part of our NSF
SBIR Phase I responsibility to obtain Phase II funding.
This includes demonstrating our I-MINDS software to potential
users and customers.
We
are porting I-MINDS to Microsoft Conference XP and C#
platforms, taking advantage of Conference XP’s stability
in conferencing designs.
We
are planning on conducting further tests of I-MINDS with
local community colleges.
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