Sharing educational scenario designs in practitioner communities

The possibility of sharing results and ideas is an important benefit of networked communities. In educational design, practitioners (e.g. teachers) specify educational scenarios that can be (re-)used, exchanged and modified at a later stage. In addition to supporting educational scenario design as such, our graphical editor SCY-SE offers functions to retrieve scenarios created by others based on a similarity measure. To examine the validity of this similarity measure in terms of correspondence with pre-defined cases, 25 participants were asked to produce graphical scenarios from given textual descriptions. First results strongly indicate that the calculated similarity was much higher between corresponding scenarios (related to the same text, but by different modellers) than in non-corresponding cases. Also, scenarios created by the same person show high dissimilarity for different cases. These results suggest that similarity-based matching is an effective and acceptable method to support the exchange among educational designers.