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Classroom Readings

Classroom Readings

Released: Aug 2014

Graduated: Jan 2018


Classroom Readings is no longer operational.

Concept:
Find reading assignments to share with your students that are on topic and at their level. Populated by articles whose usage patterns on JSTOR suggest they were frequently taught in classes, Classroom Readings helps time-crunched teachers incorporate scholarly sources into their classes.

What we did:

  1. Identified a corpus of ~9,000 articles from JSTOR whose usage patterns ned us too believe they had been assigned in classrooms
  2. Conducted a flash build designing a site for teachers that allowed them to search and select these articles as well as to browse subject-related lists
  3. Released Classroom Readings as an open prototype.

What we built:

What we learned

  1. We could effectively use certain usage patterns (esp. short bursts of many uses at a single institution) to identify content used in classes
  2. Reading level, length of article, lack of jargon and how well the article stands on its own are all considered heavily before selecting articles for a classroom.
  3. Teachers are always short on time - having suggested lists was helpful.