These are interesting questions, but I think that it will be hard to comprehensively address ALL of them simultaneously.

I think the WHO question is foundational. For instance:

(0) How is the current 'teacher' role modified in delivering low-cost high-quality math education via the Internet?

(1) Who benefits from low-cost high-quality mathematics education via the Internet?

(2) Who stands to lose?

You haven't specified whether the learners themselves are picking the material -- or whether they're being guided by others. Live tutorials and 'good survey articles' suggest that there are other people directing things; with interactive textbooks that's less clear. Are you trying to scale numbers? Deliver education over a distance? From

I'm guessing that you're imagining distributing the 'educator' role through crowdsourcing. That in itself would be an interesting discussion.

You might also think about the risks -- such as cultural and linguistic barriers, disruption to existing education systems, etc. As well as what current roles are played by teachers.

Furthermore, you haven't specified what level of education you're talking about -- and thus what kind of mathematics you're talking about. Addition? Fractions? Algebra? Graduate Mathematics?

You might look at the Math Forum, especially 'Ask Dr. Math':

I suspect you're well aware of it from

The OER and Creative Commons Education communities are likely to have more suggestions and advice than the wiki-research-l folks (in case you haven't tried there, too!).

On 23 Nov 2010, at 13:16, Joe Corneli wrote:

So far, the best phrasing I've come up with is: "What stands in the
way of building and supplying low-cost, high-quality mathematics
education via the internet?"

The art of encyclopedia-building doesn't seem to carry over directly
to education. This should be of fairly general concern (the Wikimedia
Foundation's mission is about developing and disseminating educational
content).

I think there's a knowledge gap in there, maybe more than one. It's
much easier for me to think about "engineering solutions" than it is
to precisely specify a research problem question!! In particular, I'm
thinking about

(a) building interactive textbooks that work for self-guided learners
(b) building technologies to support live tutorials over the web
(c) building infrastructure to help in developing good survey articles
or similar content

The faculty here might want me to "pick one", but this is hard for me
to do because I see each of these three approaches as being part of
the puzzle. Asking how well one of them works in absence of the other
is a bit like asking how well a fish can breathe in the absence of
water.

So maybe the "research question" is about asking: What is the family
resemblance of (a)-(c)? How do they work together as a system? Or
maybe the question is about whether a given implementation of (a)-(c)
shows any promise?

I seem to be struggling to switch from a hacking-oriented way of
thinking about things to a research-oriented way of thinking about
things. I'd appreciate some feedback from those of you in a position
to offer advice on these matters.

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