Key Aspects of Cyberlearning Resources with Compelling Results

The positive outcomes of existing cyberlearning resources, like Scratch, PhET, and the Mobile Studio, hint at the promise cyberlearning holds for facilitating the development of 21 century skills. While National Science Foundation (NSF) Program Officers (POs) are interested in continuing to support cyberlearning research and developments that promote excellence in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, there is a need to understand elements of existing resources that have already achieved positive outcomes. An exploratory sequential mixed methods research design was used to explore this topic. Of the 1,000 NSF-funded projects POs have highlighted in the NSF Highlights over the past 10 years, nearly100 were cyberlearning awards. After applying selection criteria to identify awards with compelling results to serve as exemplars, one-hour interviews were conducted with the developers of 15 cyberlearning resources to garner insights on their approaches to development, implementation, and dissemination. This paper includes insights about the larger population of cyberlearning resources, as well as some of the key aspects of cyberlearning exemplars. Such insight are not only helpful to POs interested in supporting future cyberlearning research, but also to future developers of cyberlearning resources.