Collaborative OpenCourseWare Authoring: The SlideWiki Platform [1449] Members : #OER17

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Thu, Apr 6 2017, 11:40am – 12:40pm

Authors: Alexander Mikroyannidis

Room: Seminar 2

Theme: Open Party

Type: Workshop

Description

A major obstacle to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education in Europe is the lack of widely available, accessible, multilingual, timely, engaging and high-quality educational material (i.e. OpenCourseWare). The creation of comprehensive OpenCourseWare (OCW) is tedious, time-consuming and expensive with the effect that often courseware employed by teachers, instructors and professors is incomplete, outdated, inaccessible to those with disabilities and dull.

With the open-source SlideWiki platform, the effort of the creation, translation and evolution of highly-structured remixable OCW can be widely shared (i.e. crowdsourced). Similarly to Wikipedia for encyclopaedic content, SlideWiki allows to collaboratively create comprehensive OCW (curricula, slide presentations, self-assessment tests, illustrations etc.) online in a crowdsourcing manner:

to semi-automatically translate this content into more than 50 different languages and
to improve the translations in a collaborative manner and
to support engagement and social networking of educators and learners around that content.

The open-source and open-access platform SlideWiki.org won the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s Excellence Award in 2014 and is used by hundreds of educators and thousands of learners. Several hundred comprehensive course materials are available on SlideWiki in dozens of languages.

The SlideWiki large-scale trial project is further maturing the SlideWiki platform by integrating it with a variety of educational platforms, including Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms, Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and interactive eBooks. The SlideWiki project is also performing four large-scale trials in:

secondary education,
vocational and professional training,
higher education and
community-driven open education.

The proposed workshop will introduce participants to the SlideWiki platform and its functionalities for collaborative authoring, crowdsourced translation of educational content, as well as social networking. Participants will also be introduced to the latest technological developments behind SlideWiki, regarding its integration with different educational platforms. Additionally, participants will have the opportunity to try the SlideWiki platform and perform a range of OER-related tasks, including finding OERs, reusing existing OERs, as well as authoring new OERs in collaboration with other participants. Participants will be able to offer their feedback via a plenary discussion and complete a questionnaire evaluating SlideWiki in terms of its usefulness and usability.

The intended audience of this workshop consists of:

Educators who want to find existing OERs and reuse or translate them, or develop new ones collaboratively with their peers.
Informal learners who want to find OERs and connect with other learners.
Researchers in the open education community who want to learn more about collaborative authoring and crowdsourced translation of OERs.
Technology enthusiasts aiming to broaden their knowledge on learning technologies for collaborative authoring and distribution of content via different educational platforms.

At the end of this workshop, participants will have acquired:

An awareness of the different approaches in producing and sharing multi-lingual OERs with the open education community.
A good overview of the range of technologies that can be employed to deliver OERs via multiple educational platforms.
An insight into best practices for designing OERs for delivery via different learning platforms and for different learning contexts.

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