Designing a new system for sharing computer science teaching resources

Many online communities for high school computer science teachers have been developed to help teachers connect with each other and share course materials. However, these sites have failed to meet teachers' needs and are widely underused. Creating new communities by repeating the design of existing sites will only require teachers to search additional sites to find what they need. Prior work has framed the inefficacy of these sites in terms of usability without exploring additional underlying problems that discourage teachers from using the sites. We interviewed teachers about their attitudes toward existing sites to further our understanding of these underlying problems. During interviews teachers said that finding relevant resources is difficult and contributing to these communities requires too much time. We propose a new design for a system that lowers the barrier to participation while providing teachers with improved access to each other's relevant course materials.