Benefits for stakeholders

Benefits for stakeholders

There are a number of big goals we want to reach:

• course co-creation with students and professors
• making course material less fragmented and searchable
• allowing students to communicate on top of the course

To determine what goal we want to emphasize, we can measure them on a number of criteria:

• how many students and professors are reached and/or will likely make use of this tool?
• does this tool lead to a real increase in learning?
• does this tool provide more comfort for the student (even if not necessarily enhancing learning)?

Keep in mind that most tools that enhance learning actually feel very bad for the student. Learning requires effort and effort is painful. When a learning strategy feels good for the student, that mostly means the student is not learning anything. We might have to lure students in with some added comfort and by structuring the discussion, not with the actual mechanism that increases their learning curve.

Benefits for students

Overarching goals

• 21st century skills
• open is the default mindset (though closed remains an option)

No more fragmented courses

• integrated course material with embedded media, code etc.

Courses are updated

• better courses because feedback from the students can easily be implemented (no more information loss through forum swipes)
• feedback and input of students is actually used

Cooperation technology

• group assignments receive the necessary infrastructure that facilitates communication

Communication technology

• conversation is structured on top of the course
• conversation is drawn away from Facebook (but if you want to stay there, you can use our URLs to refer to specific parts of the course)

Search function

• webslides are searchable like webpages

Bonus benefits

• courses and slides can be read on any device (mobile)
• layout of the slides can be altered (e.g. print-friendly layout)
• by choosing an open standard, the students are able to customize the course material
• interactive course material leads to real learning benefits

Benefits for teachers

Education becomes more time efficient

• professors and assistants can more easily update the course (no more integrating of multiple altered copies across assistants)
• with one mouse click, professors can validate or discard corrections or alterations suggested by the students or assistants (students are putting in the effort of clarifying difficult parts of the course together anyway, so why not use this material?)
• the course keeps growing spontaneously and remains up-to-date throughout the years (it doesn't need to be perfect from the start)
• answer a question only once by validating suggestions, and reduce your inbox overload in following years

Useful teaching evaluations

• professors are provided with direct student feedback
• evaluation goes in two directions (misconceptions can be clarified)

When slides are shared openly

• increased international visibility
• feedback from the outside reaches the course
• for postdoctoral researchers: open webslides form a handy extension of your CV

Bonus benefits

• no more problems with multimedia during the lectures, all media is embedded
• no more wasting time on layout, instead focus on structure
• easy to reuse slides in multiple presentations because the content (structure) and the layout are separate
• there is always a backup (GitHub history) of adjustments made, so you never lose discarded chunks

Benefits for UGent

Responsibility towards the students

• better student-professor interaction
• this project is in line with the goals of the UGent: activerend onderwijs and multiperspectivisme (see below for a definition)

Future educational perspective

• co-creation is all the new hype
• UGent can promote itself as an innovative university
• UGent supports the grass-roots initiatives taken by its professors
• this technology is already there (it is being used worldwide + UGent has a GitHub and Jupyter notebook infrastructure) so all we need to do is use it in order to stay relevant
• this project is compatible with existing initiatives (to ensure a long-term vision)
• learning patterns can more easily be mined for research and for evidence-based improvement of education

Actively assert the public presence of the UGent

• free publicity for the UGent
• increase societal and economic impact
• open webslides support our global commitment
• extremely easy to make UGent templates (huisstijl) that can automatically be updated without any effort

activerend onderwijs

• ICT tools should benefit communication skills
• students should acquire skills in shaping their own learning trajectory (lifelong learning objective)
• UGent has not clarified the methodologies to implement activerend onderwijs (e.g. blended learning and flipped classrooms)
• students might prefer to stay passive
• important to make participation part of the student evaluation

multiperspectivisme

• link course to parts of other courses
• create courses that integrate skills from other courses
• provide room for students to choose courses from other faculties (minor, major, elective course, basic courses across faculties in 1st bachelor)
• bring multidisciplinary research to education