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.