Guided Inquiry Learning with Technology: Community Feedback and Software for Social Constructivism.

To meet current and future demands, education needs to become more effective and more scalable. One evidence-based, social constructivist approach is Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL). In POGIL, teams of learners work on specifically designed activities that guide them to practice key skills and develop their own understanding of key concepts. This paper expands a prior conference paper, and describes a series of investigations of how technology might enhance POGIL to be more effective and more scalable. The investigations include a survey and structured discussions among POGIL community leaders, a UI mockup and a working prototype, and experiences piloting the prototype in a large introductory course at a university. These investigations reveal that instructors are interested in using such tools. Tools can support richer learning experiences for students and provide better reporting to help instructors monitor progress and facilitate learning. The course pilot demonstrates that a prototype can support a large hybrid class. These investigations also identified promising areas for future work.