Project information
Name of project: Co-created Interactive Courseware
Acronym: CiC
Refrence nr./contract nr.: 2019-1-UK01-KA203-061669
Project website/link: https://cic.um.si
Project funding/programme: Erasmus+ КА2
Time frame: 01. 01. 2020 – 31. 12. 2022
Total costs: 299,545.00 €
Co-funding rate (in %): 0%
The amount of co-financing (UM FERI share): 50.502,00 €
UM FERI Coordinator: Prof. Tatjana Welzer
Partners
- Project Coordinator: University of Wolverhampton (UK)
- Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (UM FERI, SLO),
- Nextbook bvba (BE),
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (BE),
- Instituto Politecnico do Porto (PT)
Project summary
The quickly evolving educational landscape offers new expectations and requirements for the tools that support the learning process. Educational technology (edtech) can be part of the answer to many of today’s challenges in higher education, such as the exceptionally high failure rate in the first year across many fields of study. Technology is an enabling force that could unlock an unseen potential in the digital-savvy student population. And yet, even with the increasing adoption of digital tools, the promise of a significant increase in study performance or effectiveness remains to be realised.
This project, Co-created Interactive Courseware, takes a holistic approach, proposing a solution that aims to increase student engagement by uniquely combining three pillars:
- A social learning environment where students can help each other learn and track their own progress,
- A fully automated publishing flow where authors can publish their existing (static) courseware and thus create interactive, co-creation-enabled textbooks with zero technical overhead,
- A learning analytics engine offering the professor/teacher insight into the full learning trajectory of their students
The technical framework on which this project will be based, Nextbook, is currently under development and has recently undergone extensive beta testing in a pilot project at the KU Leuven. This platform is available via www.nextbook.io. The project will establish the pedagogical backdrop against which these newly available tools could be implemented in future courses, and aims to create a methodology around co-creation and learning analytics that could be applied to different contexts as well.
Key deliverables / activities
The long-term objective of this project is to make the resources available that are needed to adopt, implement, support and grow the use of co-created interactive courseware in higher education.
These include:
- a pedagogical framework, outlining how teachers can incorporate co-creation into their teaching methods
- training material for teachers and students
- example courseware enriched with co-creation functionalities
- learnings from past pilot projects
An online knowledge centre will be established to make these resources available in English, Portuguese, Slovenian, Dutch, and other languages. This knowledge base is complemented by an interactive application where students can consult the courseware published by their teachers, here both students and teachers can interact with each other, and where they can improve and enrich the courseware via a built-in graphical text editor.
Upon its completion, several training and multiplier events will serve to reach a wider audience in each of the participating countries, including educational institutions that are not directly involved in this project. Seeing as the value of a community-based platform increases superlinearly with the size of its community, these events will set the stage for further growth and ensure the long-term sustainability of the initiative.
UM FERI activities
Univerza v Mariboru will take the lead in developing the materials in O5. As the community-based website and the online co-creation platform play a pivotal role in the integration of various intellectual outputs.
