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.
The main goal of the project was to create an effective means of the co-creation of learning through the use of interactive online courseware. Alongside this, we aimed to offer educators insights into their students’ learning experience through the use of learning analytics, which we aimed to build into the platform, following a research-led design approach, taking feedback from users (learners and educators) at each step. The project created a pedagogic framework as a proof of concept, and assessed a learning analytics (LA) approach that provides feedback to students, student advisors, and teachers in the transition. The platform allowed for pedagogic use cases to be carried out by different educators at a variety of scales. The platform will be available commercially, but is still free-to-use currently. The pedagogic framework, learning analytics for interactive courseware study, user handbooks and case studies are summarized in general and policy recommendations and available on the Erasmus+ Projects' Results Platform.
The goal of the project was to enhance student engagement in learning 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 educator/s insight into the full learning trajectory of their students. This project's main objective was to have a significantly positive impact in how student and teachers interact with each other, how learning resources are consumed, and how these resources are continuously improved. A platform and framework were provided to facilitate and incentivise co-constructive interactions, where students will help each other learn and where teachers can learn about their students. Whilst we did not meet our target indicators in terms of usage (see below), we created this pedagogical framework, a new understanding of learning analytics for co-creative learning and extensively trialled iterations of the platform, meeting all our IOs.