International Internet Classroom Project

Department of Computer Science
University of Arizona
Office: Gould-Simpson 825
E-mail:

Welcome

The purpose of the International Internet Classroom (IIC) project is to create the most effective online platform for providing free, high quality K16 education in all of the world's major languages. The Internet today is inundated with educational portals and sites offering access (for a price and for free) to various types of academic resources. These online educational sites, like the rest of cyberspace, are growing daily. But there exists no easy and efficient way to navigate through these abundant resources, forcing both educators and students to turn to standard Google (or Yahoo!, Bing, etc.) keyword searching and sifting through the endless results. The IIC team is seeking to bring order to this chaos by developing web-based tools that ease the task of both finding relevant, high quality online educational resources and creating/compiling your own resources to share with others.

Motivation

The motivations for this project are many, but perhaps the most significant are a set of trends that indicate that our educational system is in trouble: (1) lack of teacher preparation, (2) teacher shortages, (3) growing gaps between high performing and low performing schools and (4) orthodox “one size fits all” take on education that allows too many students to fall through the cracks or not reach their highest potential. Scores are falling, students are dropping out of school, employers are frustrated, and too few students have sufficient mathematics and science training to support competitiveness in research. These problems are acute in the United States, but they afflict many other nations. Building a platform that provides quick, effective and organized dissemination of educational information on the web is necessary for both educators and students in the 21st century.