Problems we want to solve

Below we will list the problems that our three main stakeholders currently face. Please add or refine if we have overlooked existing concerns.

Problems students experience

Fragmented courses

• Course material is fragmented across multiple platforms (slides, course text, course notes, external tutorials, articles, lab notes, exercises).
• This fragmentation is particularly noticeable across courses because each professor uses his/her own favorite platform (external to Minerva).
• Although audiovisual and interactive material exist, they are often located at external platform and not embedded within the slides and/or courses.

Courses are not updated

• The feedback elicited from the students during course and teacher evaluations at the end of the year doesn't lead to visible changes, so why participate?
• The feedback is rather general, there is little room for nuance or specific remarks.
• Errors or poorly formulated sections of the course need to be clarified by the students from scratch each year via forums and then at the end of the year the Minerva forum is swiped again or a new Facebook group is created.

Lacking cooperation technology

• There are few really well organized platforms for group assignments. For example a paragraph or chunk of code was removed a few weeks ago and can't be retrieved.

Lacking communication technology

• The fora on Minerva can be a bit of a wall of shame (you can't remove or adjust a comment once it is made).
• Some students don't dare to post on Minerva out of fear of saying something stupid (you can't post anonymously).
• Discussion on the course material has largely moved to social media (Facebook), a trend that seems difficult to reverse as these media benefit from high traffic.
• These social media are poorly structured for conversations with a large number of students. They just seem to be the best option among a number of unfavorable options.
• These platforms are closed off instead of open.
• Foreign or visiting students can experience difficulty accessing these closed groups.
• There is often no possibility of feedback from the teacher (possibly, students are shying away from critical remarks and prefer the comfort of a group of friends to pose questions).
• Facebook is awfully distracting during the exams.

No good search function across courses

• You know a concept or equation was explained in some course from previous years or possibly in another UGent course, but where did I put (my download of) that course? I wish there was a link right here on this page that could take me there... (e.g., basic course in mathematics taught in 1st bachelor). Looking at it from another perspective: why oh why am I learning this abstract stuff? What could it be useful for? I wish there was a link right here on this page that would take me there...(e.g., specialized course in the masters).

Interim conclusion
Open webslides solve the problem of fragmented courses by allowing all content to be embedded within the HTML structure. They also allow for easy course updates when placed within a system such as GitHub. Using GitHub it also becomes easy to coordinate group assignments. The lack of good communication tools and of good search functions is not directly solved by GitHub in a very user friendly way. Indeed, questions can be posed using issues and the description of commits, but we are lacking an integrated interface such as Perusall.

Problems teachers experience

Education needs to be more time efficient

• Professors and teaching postdoctoral researchers are mainly rewarded for their publications, not for their teaching. So they want to waste as little time as possible.
• Keeping a course up to date requires a lot of effort and it is often unclear what problems need to be tackled.
• High amount of emails from students clutter up the inbox.
• When sending question emails, students often fail to specify on what particular part of the course they have a question.

Teaching evaluations

• Feedback from the students only arrives at the end of the year when it's already too late.
• Feedback is an evaluation tool for career progress, rather than for course improvement.
• Student feedback is collected in a nonspecific way, so it is not clear what parts of the course should be adjusted.
• The valuable feedback that students do provide on social media or the Minerva fora are hard to access or require a lot of time to filter.

Interim conclusion
Open webslides make it more easy to update courses by simply placing them in a GitHub system and accepting or rejecting suggested changes. By being responsive to students in a time efficient and visible way throughout the course, better evaluations are to be expected.

Problems the UGent experiences

Responsibility towards the students

• How to provide students with transferable skills and 21st century citizenship?
• How to achieve activerend onderwijs and multiperspectivisme? (two goals of the UGent)

Future educational perspective

• How to stay relevant and promote the UGent as an innovative educator in 21st century education?
• How to respond to MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses)?
• Own technology can't compete with Facebook because Facebook simply has more traffic and hence, the conversation moves there.
• The UGent offers a lot of educational tools but most professors don't use them, while there is a large demand from the students (e.g., response technology during the courses, online learning trajectories).

How to assert the public presence of the UGent

• How can the UGent increase the visibility of its expertise in education and research?
• How to attract collaborations with the public and private sector?

Interim conclusion
Open webslides naturally allow for increased student activation and multidisciplinary views via the material students add to the course. With webslides that are rich in media (e.g., include code) you lure traffic back to the course and the conversation will follow automatically. So any investments you do make in ICT will pay off. By sharing the webslides online, the UGent further positions itself in the knowledge market.