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Description
The advance of the Internet has shattered the old-order educational paradigm where teachers were the almost exclusive owners of knowledge and best practices. In the new-order educational paradigm, information is one click away: knowledge and best practices are readily available for the eager student in the form of digital educational content.
The one-click-away availability of digital educational content is a challenge for teachers, who must now relinquish their role as knowledge keepers and focus more on mentoring, providing insights and motivating students. Even so, skilled teachers will have to structure, update, adapt the content to the needs of their students. We argue that current digital educational content has flaws that hinder its better use by teachers and students alike: it is closed, unstructured, general, static, non-practical and non-reproducible.
Open-Edu proposes to revamp the development, delivery and curation of digital educational content by taking in the mindset, best practices and ideas from one of the most successful new-order ventures: the open source collaborative model. Open-Edu aims to use the open source collaborator model for the development, deployment and curation of digital education content. The new digital education content will be public, customizable, dynamic and up-to-date, practical and reproducible. Content consumption (in the form of exercise drills) and content contributions (improving existing content, adding new content) will provide educational cryptocurrency to students; educational cryptocurrency can be used to acquire digital and physical goods for educational benefits.
Summary of project results
Having a donor partner was pivotal to gaining the excellent experience in teaching and digital content of Gunnar Stefansson and his crew. Moreover, their focus on a topic different than the Compute Science / IT topics we pursued allowed us to integrated a greater diversity of content and topics.
At this point, the Open Education Hub initiative has caught up steam, with a number of people acknowledging it and asking to have their content developed using the methodology and infrastructure proposed. But it''s still considered to be technically and CS-related. With the CCAS class from University of Iceland, this allowed us to integrate different types of content. And also to integrate other ideas they have been pursuing such as: templated quiz questions - a template is used to generate multiple question types, student peer review items, awards for digital cryptocurrency.
Having University of Iceland as partner in the Open Education Hub community will expose it to a wider audience of teaching staff and students, particularly in areas such as maths.
The two papers were created together. In particular, the methodology paper and its development relied on the concrete teaching experience and past publications experience of University of Iceland.
By working together, by having periodic once-every-two-weeks meetings (noted on GitHub: https://github.com/open-education-hub/meeting-notes/tree/main/status-updates, and by keeping an active connection on Discord, UNSTPB and UI were able to bootstrap the online Open Education Hub community. We took part in 3 trans-national project meetings in person, we worked on intellectual outputs, we created two papers submissions.
The integration of diverse question ecosystems (TutorWeb, Moodle, QuizManager) is well underway,past the initial scope of the project. Potential users and stakeholder have been asking about SmileyCoins, continued digitalization and generation of interactive and quiz-type content.
As the Open Education Hub initiative has just started, and as there is already a burgeoning international community around it, the continued collaboration between UNSTPB and UI will continue and it will be improved in the future, particularly with the heavier integration of TutorWeb and SmileyCoins.
The Open Education Hub project has developed and deployed tools that help teachers reduce the administration load that is set on teachers. This have done by creating workflows, templates, and frameworks that automate the tasks of integrating and deploying new materials and checking assignments. These actions have been done while also increasing educational resources availability by posting all materials online in an open source fashion, allowing third parties to both consume the content and reuse it.
They have built an Open Source tool that improves the process of creating materials and publishing them.
The task of automated assignment checking has been enhanced at UNSTPB by integrating VMchecker. A large number of classes have already picked up the new assignment checking tool, as it scales up better than other tools, and it requires fewer setup steps. Using the existing institutional infrastructure, we have been able to increase the performance of homework checking, while making the process of grading, creating and managing assignments easier.
They defined "Open Education Hub" as a trademark of good practices in developing and deploying open source educational materials.
There were organized materials and delivered content for the training "Cybersecurity for IT Professionals", beyond the initial set of proposed outputs of the project, available on GitHub: https://github.com/open-education-hub/cybersecurity-for-it-professionals/
These materials have been developed for the course of 8 months and featured 3 instances of 40 hours of training for about 40 participants. Materials have been organized according to the methodology as open source items (public and private information). The contents feature 8 chapters of topics related to cybersecurity, with both theoretical and practical topics, making use of GitHub and Docker-based infrastructure.
There were organized materials and delivered content for a Cybersecurity Workshop, targeted for newcomers, available on GitHub: https://github.com/open-education-hub/cybersec-workshop
The contents are targeted for a 4 hours use and feature mostly demonstrative practical content related to cybersecurity. They are open source and follow the Open Education Hub methodology. Output Description
https://github.com/open-education-hub/openedu-builder,
https://github.com/open-education-hub/oer-template,
https://github.com/open-education-hub/vmchecker-next,
https://github.com/open-education-hub/vmchecker-next-api
For students, our open collaborative approach makes it easier to share ideas, speeding up how quickly they get feedback.
Content creators can steadily improve materials while discussing ideas openly. The system handles the technical work behind the scenes, lightening the load for creators.
Teachers also benefit by having access to updated materials, which cuts down their workload. This lets them concentrate on teaching plans and choosing the best content for students.
Previously, there had no proper way to track how much students were involved or how content developers contributed as we used wikis. Students had no way to suggest changes, report issues, give feedback, or even propose fixes for educational materials other than messaging content developers. This made it hard for them to take part and improve things. Content developers also had a tough time working together. There was no good way to review material together or store different versions of it.
For students, despite the earlier limitations, there were noticed 43 pull requests where they offered suggestions, fixes, or improvements. They also raised 19 issues, flagging problems with content or infrastructure. 12 of these issues were resolved, showcasing a much faster feedback process than traditional methods. These metrics offer us our initial formal understanding of how students participated, showing promise despite the previous absence of clear ways to contribute.
For teachers, they track the interest in the openedu model by observing the number of educators who have shown interest—currently standing at 12 forks for the openedu-template repository initiated by educators.
All of these and on obvious synergy and concern for high quality teaching materials and teaching activities have strengthened the relation, and they will work on preserving that for the future.
The project has achieved its goal by providing a methodology and software to allow teachers to automate the setup and maintenance of classes using open source software solutions. This output decreases the amount of work that teachers have to do to create new classes or integrate and deploy new content.
Number of joint intellectual outputs created in cooperation projects - 7
Summary of bilateral results
The advance of the Internet has shattered the old-order educational paradigm where teachers were the almost exclusive owners of knowledge and best practices. In the new-order educational paradigm, information is one click away: knowledge and best practices are readily available for the hungry student in the form of digital educational content.The one-click-away availability of digital educational content is a challenge for teachers, who must now relinquish their role as knowledge keepers and focus more on mentoring, providing insights and motivating students. Even so, skilled teachers will have to structure, update, adapt the content to the needs of their students. Open-Edu proposes to revamp the development, delivery and curation of digital educational content by taking in the mindset, best practices and ideas from one of the most successful new-order ventures: the open source collaborative model. . Deployment is making it available to students. Curation is keeping it well structured, up-to-date, easy to be used and contributed back. The new digital education content will be public, customizable, dynamic and up-to-date, practical and reproducible.During the project there were produced the following:A methodology that aids content developers, content deliverers and content consumers to create, deliver and use digital content that is easily shareable, modifiable and reusable. The methodology is open and easily accessible by anyone: https://github.com/open-education-hub/methodologyAn infrastructure that aids in implementing the devised methodology by offering support to publish the educational and to autocorrect assignments: https://github.com/open-education-hub/openedu-builder . 3 repositories for 3 university courses that contain educational materials devised by using the methodology.