Lessons learned from the use of the SlideWiki OpenCourseWare platform in different learning contexts

Abstract

The SlideWiki platform is fostering open education by supporting the collaborative authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing of open educational content online. This paper presents the lessons learned from piloting the SlideWiki platform in different learning contexts and scenarios. In particular, we describe the learning scenarios considered in each pilot and how these scenarios have been implemented with the use of SlideWiki. We then describe the methodology followed in each pilot, in terms of the authoring, teaching and learning activities performed by educators and learners using SlideWiki. Finally, the lessons learned from each pilot are discussed, focusing on the challenges faced in each pilot, how these challenges have been addressed, as well as the best practices that have emerged from the pilots regarding the collaborative authoring and sharing of open educational content.

Full text

LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE USE OF THE SLIDEWIKI
OPENCOURSEWARE PLATFORM IN DIFFERENT LEARNING
CONTEXTS
A. Mikroyannidis1, F. Pallonetto2, E. Mangina2, N. Pyrini2, M. Sadauskas3, E.
Trepule3, A. Volungevičienė3, C. Panagiotakopoulos4, A. Karatrantou4, S.
Armakolas4, A. Nelson Mauro5, L. Cheniti6, O. Korbaa6
1The Open University (UNITED KINGDOM)
2University College Dublin (IRELAND)
3Vytautas Magnum University (LITHUANIA)
4University of Patras (GREECE)
5Dataninja srls (ITALY)
6University of Sousse (TUNISIA)
Abstract
The SlideWiki platform is fostering open education by supporting the collaborative authoring, sharing,
reusing and remixing of open educational content online. This paper presents the lessons learned
from piloting the SlideWiki platform in different learning contexts and scenarios. In particular, we
describe the learning scenarios considered in each pilot and how these scenarios have been
implemented with the use of SlideWiki. We then describe the methodology followed in each pilot, in
terms of the authoring, teaching and learning activities performed by educators and learners using
SlideWiki. Finally, the lessons learned from each pilot are discussed, focusing on the challenges faced
in each pilot, how these challenges have been addressed, as well as the best practices that have
emerged from the pilots regarding the collaborative authoring and sharing of open educational
content.
Keywords: collaborative authoring, sharing, reusing, remixing, crowdsourcing, open educational
resources, open education.
1 INTRODUCTION
The SlideWiki project
1
is a European initiative, creating a platform that facilitates large-scale
collaboration around educational content. Since its launch [1], the SlideWiki platform
2
has grown its
user base to hundreds of educators and thousands of learners and has won the OpenCourseWare
Consortium’s Excellence Award. Several hundred comprehensive open learning materials are
currently available on the SlideWiki platform in different languages.
The SlideWiki platform allows the creation of educational content either by individual authors or
collaboratively by groups of authors [2]. Additionally, users can interact with the offered content in
various ways, such as via commenting, answering quizzes, as well as by reusing and adapting the
content according to their needs. Authors can either upload existing content to the platform in the form
of a PowerPoint or OpenOffice presentation, or start creating a slide deck from scratch. They can
assign editing permissions to co-authors, who can then start editing their content using a WYSIWYG
(what you see is what you get) HTML editor, or by editing the HTML code directly. Authors may also
group slide decks together in the form of playlists. The export options available for content in SlideWiki
include common formats and standard specifications, such as HTML, PDF, ePUB and SCORM.
All content on the SlideWiki platform is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
4.0 International License,
3
which allows it to be reused, repurposed and republished. In order to reuse
a deck or a sub-deck, one can ‘fork’ it thus creating a copy of the content that can be further adapted
by the user that forked it. All changes made to content are tracked by the platform and displayed in the
1
https://slidewiki.eu
2
https://slidewiki.org
3
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

history tab of the content. Authors can easily track how their content is being reused and repurposed
within the platform via the activity feed and the usage tab of their content.
SlideWiki is fostering open education by supporting the authoring and sharing of Open Educational
Resources (OERs). OERs can be described as “teaching, learning and research resources that reside
in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their
free use or repurposing by others depending on which Creative Commons license is used” [3]. The
emergence of OERs is facilitating online education through the use and sharing of open and reusable
learning resources online. Learners and educators can now access, download, remix, and republish a
wide variety of high-quality learning materials [4, 5].
The SlideWiki project is building upon and promoting the OER initiative by introducing the SlideWiki
platform to different communities of educators and learners [6]. The SlideWiki project is performing a
wide range of trials covering different levels of education (i.e. from secondary to higher education) and
different types of learning (i.e. formal learning, informal learning, vocational learning). Each of these
large-scale trials is carried out with hundreds of educators and thousands of learners in different
countries across Europe.
This paper presents the lessons learned from piloting the SlideWiki platform in a variety of learning
contexts and scenarios. The purpose of these ongoing pilots is to raise awareness about SlideWiki, as
well as gather valuable feedback about the platform from different communities of learners and
educators. The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. First, we introduce the learning
scenarios considered for piloting SlideWiki and describe the methodology followed in each pilot, in
terms of the authoring, teaching and learning activities performed by educators and learners. The
lessons learned from the pilots are then discussed, focusing on the challenges faced in each pilot.
Finally, the paper is concluded and the next steps of this work are outlined.
2 LEARNING SCENARIOS & METHODOLOGY
2.1 SlideWiki pilot at the University of Milan
This pilot is conducted in the context of the course “Data Visualisation Skills” offered by the University
of Milan in collaboration with the company Dataninja srls. By completing this course, students receive
3 university credits (ECTS). In terms of learning outcomes, the course provides university students
with basic knowledge and practical skills in the field of data visualisation. At the end of the course,
students are able to run all the steps of the data visualisation process (Find, Verify/Clean, Analyse,
Visualise/Present).
The delivery of the course follows an active approach, i.e. ‘learning by doing’, and puts into practice
key principles of the various educational paradigms and models covered as part of its content:
networked learning [7], participatory cultures [8], connected learning [9], hybrid pedagogy [10-12] and
open education [13], among others.
Throughout the programme, participants create digital artefacts of different kinds and develop a rich
personal teaching-learning environment on the open web while exploring the Domains of One’s Own
(DoOO)
4
philosophy and ‘Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere’ (POSSE)
5
model. Their
own domain (made of a personal and/or project-based website) is a very tangible output that operates
as an open portfolio gathering more granular resources.
Approximately 1000 students have been reached so far in the context of this pilot and nearly 250 of
them have enrolled to the course. Students have been using the SlideWiki platform, both for
consuming content and for producing their own content, individually or in groups as part of their course
assignments. The educational content for this pilot has been developed in English and has been
released under the standard open licence of the SlideWiki platform. Figure 1 shows one of the slide
decks developed for this pilot.
4
https://www.wired.com/insights/2012/07/a-domain-of-ones-own/
5
https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Figure 1. A slide deck introducing the “Data Visualisation Skills” course of the University of Milan pilot.
2.2 SlideWiki pilot at Vytautas Magnus University
The main objectives of this pilot are to promote the usage of OERs and Creative Commons (CC)
licensing in the teaching process among Vytautas Magnus University teachers, as well as involve
students in the learning process, familiarise them with SlideWiki and encourage further usage of the
platform. 15 teachers are participating in this pilot, selected from different faculties and different
programmes, both undergraduate and postgraduate ones. All selected teachers have good computer
literacy skills and are experienced in the use of the institutional Moodle Learning Management System
(LMS) and its tools. Their teaching subjects vary between foreign languages, management, political
and social sciences.
Figure 2. The introductory workshop for teachers organized by Vytautas Magnus University.
A workshop was initially organised for teachers, where they were introduced to OERs, Creative
Commons licensing and the SlideWiki platform. Figure 2 shows photos from this event, during which
teachers registered to the platform, completed their profile page and started developing content.

Throughout the pilot, teachers have been provided with support and guidance for using SlideWiki, for
uploading and creating slides, for embedding presentations in the institutional LMS, as well as for
engaging students to use SlideWiki for their group presentations and for their further study in the
university.
The 15 participating teachers have created 5 lectures each, with each lecture consisting of
approximately 20 slides. Figure 3 shows the slide deck developed by a teacher for one of her lectures.
Slides have been developed in the Lithuanian and English languages. After developing slides, the
teachers were asked to embed them to their courses in the institutional Moodle LMS. Additionally, the
teachers developed assignments for students that involved SlideWiki. In this way, students have not
only used SlideWiki for viewing slides presented by the teachers, but have also developed their own
content in SlideWiki. In total, 1557 slides have been created and 472 students have been involved so
far in this pilot.
Figure 3. A slide deck in the Lithuanian language developed for the Vytautas Magnus University pilot.
2.3 SlideWiki pilot at the University of Sousse
This pilot involves 4 faculties at the University of Sousse with diverse learner profiles, including
students with backgrounds in engineering, computer science, web design, medicine and management.
5 educators and around 400 students are involved in this pilot by producing and sharing open content
via SlideWiki, following the 5 R’s principles:
• Retain: Students and educators have the ability to make their own copies of the content (e.g.,
download, duplicate, store, and manage).

• Reuse: Students and educators have the ability to use the content in a wide range of ways
(e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video).
• Revise: Students and educators have the ability to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content
itself (e.g., translate the content into another language).
• Remix: Students and educators have the ability to combine the original or revised content with
other material to create something new.
• Redistribute: Students and educators have the ability to share copies of the original content,
revised versions, or remixed versions.
2.4 SlideWiki pilot at University College Dublin
This pilot is conducted in the context of a vocational training course taught to 2 separate classes of
students, one of which acts as a control group and the other one as the group exposed to SlideWiki.
These classes are taught at the Vocational Training School of Markopoulo (SlideWiki group) and the
Vocational Training School of Rafina (control group), both specialising in “Cooling and Air Conditioning
Installations”.
The main concept of the course taught during this pilot is “Energy labels”. The students at the end of
the course are able to describe the operating features, advantages and disadvantages of devices with
different energy labels. As part of the skills development within this module, the following features are
being assessed: Students should be able to recognize what appears on the air conditioning labels and
how to find the degree of performance of an air-conditioning unit. Through self-assessment, students
are evaluating their own efforts. They transfer their new knowledge to examples of everyday life, i.e.
by recognising the energy efficiency features of air conditioners in their residences.
A total of 23 students have been involved in this pilot (11 in the control group and 12 in the SlideWiki
group). Screenshots of SlideWiki slides and photos taken during this pilot are shown in Figure 4. The
methodology followed in this pilot is the development of concepts within the area of energy labels. The
students are encouraged to look for and find content through the theoretical presentation from the
educator, structure their thoughts and practice the theory through the hands-on activity session in the
class. Feedback and revision are the final and equally important parts of the lecture in order to revise
and self-reflect on the learning scenario and the teaching strategy.
Figure 4. Course content in SlideWiki and photos from the control group of the University College
Dublin pilot.

2.5 SlideWiki pilot at the University of Patras
The pilot is conducted by the Computer and Educational Technology Lab at the Department of
Primary Education and is based on an online course with the theme of “Ethics and Technology” using
the SlideWiki platform as the main learning and collaboration space. The course is attended by future
and in-service teachers of primary and secondary education.
During this pilot, trainees have been studying and interacting with the educational content, which is
organised in 4 decks, one for each week of the course. Every week, trainees undertake the following
tasks: (a) They study the content of the slides of the deck; (b) they study additional material unloaded
under the Sources tab of SlideWiki; (c) they add their comments to contribute to a discussion about
the main idea of the content using the commenting functionality of SlideWiki; (d) they add their
comments to ask questions or/and express their difficulties with the platform; (e) they assess their
knowledge by answering the questions under the Questions tab of SlideWiki. During the 3rd week of
the course, trainees are asked to collaboratively create content in SlideWiki. In the last week, trainees
are asked to discuss and express their opinions about their experiences with the SlideWiki platform
and the content they have studied.
Figure 5. A playlist of slide decks in the Greek language used in the University of Patras pilot.
The pilot is conducted in the following 3 stages:
1. Educational material production: The educational content (4 decks and additional content) is
produced on the platform collaboratively by 4 members of academic staff. They are coming
from 3 different Academic Institutes/Universities (University of Patras, Hellenic Open
University, School of Pedagogical and Technological Education-ASPETE). The educational
content is delivered to trainees on a weekly basis using a playlist for each group of trainees.
One of these playlists is shown in Figure 5.
2. Implementation of the learning scenario: A total of 143 trainees are attending the online
course. Among them, 55 are pre-service teachers of secondary education studying at
ASPETE, 32 are undergraduate students at the Department of Primary Education of the
University of Patras, 13 are postgraduate students at the Department of Primary Education of

the University of Patras, 13 are in-service teachers, 10 are postgraduate students of the
Hellenic Open University attending the curriculum ‘Studies in Education’ and 17 are
postgraduate students of the Hellenic Open University attending curriculums in the field of
ICT.
3. Analysis of the data: Sources of data collection are statistics collected via SlideWiki’s Activity
Feed and History tools, as well as the trainees’ comments/answers. The comments/answers
of trainees are analysed and grouped together forming characteristic answers in order to have
a feedback with quantitative characteristics.
3 LESSONS LEARNED
As all pilots described in this paper are currently ongoing, no final results can be reported yet.
However, by analysing the ways that the learners and educators involved in these pilots have been
using the SlideWiki platform, useful information can be derived about the usability of the platform, the
educational facilities and opportunities it offers, as well as the difficulties or problems of its use.
Overall, the SlideWiki platform has been positively received by learners and educators in all pilots,
despite the technical difficulties that arose in certain cases, mostly attributed to bugs caused by the
ongoing development of the platform. These bugs have been reported to the SlideWiki project and
have been subsequently addressed by the team of SlideWiki developers. Additionally, valuable
feedback has been collected by learners and educators about potential improvements to the platform,
both regarding its usability and usefulness as a collaborative authoring tool. Educators participating in
the pilots have appreciated the ability to easily reuse, adapt and share educational content. Learners
have also been keen to use the collaborative aspects of the platform in order to co-create the
educational artefacts required to achieve the learning outcomes of their courses.
In the context of the University College Dublin pilot, the assessment results of the control group have
been compared with the assessment results of the SlideWiki group. Table 1 provides the results from
the students’ assessment for each group. In particular, the SlideWiki group had 67% average score on
assessment, with female learners 100% success rate. The control group had 64% average score with
maximum score one learner at 90%. Although the number of learners is low to statistically prove the
positive effect of SlideWiki, further exploration of a class during a whole semester would provide the
impact of the reusable digital repositories via SlideWiki.
Table 1. Results from the University College Dublin pilot.
Vocational
Training School
Total No of
Learners
Online
Assessment
Completion
Average
Assessment
Score
Maximum Score &
No of Learners
Control group
11 (Male: 11
Female: 0)
100% (Male: 11,
Female: 0)
64%
90 (1)
SlideWiki group
12 (Male: 9
Female: 3)
50% (Male: 3,
Female: 3)
67%
100 (4)
The pilot conducted by the University of Patras has gathered useful feedback from participants in the
following questions:
• Can the SlideWiki platform be used for collaborative creation of educational material
efficiently? To what extent and why? Participants responded that the SlideWiki platform can
be used for collaborative creation, editing and management of educational content by
teachers (94%) due to its simple and flexible tools. The slides can be created and edited using
embedded images, video and other web objects without the need for special technical
knowledge (58%). It also can be used by students to work on projects collaboratively in small
groups (53%) due to its ease of use and user-friendliness. The commenting functionality offers
a tool for discussion and interaction (48%) during deck creation and the activity feed offers
important information about deck editing and management (42%).

• What difficulties have you encountered and what interventions do you think should be carried
out to improve the platform? No significant difficulties in using the platform were reported by
the majority of participants (94%) but some trainees asked for a brief guide for the facilities of
the platform with examples of good practices (27%). The majority of trainees were interested
in the ability to edit and manage their comments after creation (63%), as well as how to delete
content (72%). Some formatting problems arose after downloading a deck with overlapping
text on slides (98%). The ability for the content creators to manage their comments and
discussion without these to be visible to trainees emerged as an important issue (48%). Some
features specifically for disabled people were also requested (18%). Finally, the participating
trainers asked for more levels of control over the rights of different user groups in the platform,
such as creator, tutor, group manager, student, guest.
• What are the most important features of the platform? Participants responded that one of the
most important features of the platform is the access to open educational resources by
ensuring appropriate Intellectual Property under Creative Commons (83%). The ability to copy
and reuse educational material by referencing the creator of the content is also deemed very
important (78%). Participants indicated that the platform enables the creation, organization
and storage of material in an easy, flexible and interactive way (76%). The ease of use of the
search tool to find material for a wide range of areas is also important to participants of this
pilot (54%). Other responses included: the platform provides accessibility at any time of the
day, using various media (desktop PC, laptop, smartphone) (43%); the platform supports the
interaction between trainer and trainees as well as among trainees (57%). The activity feed
(42%), slideshow (58%), download (97%) and share (42%) functionalities were deemed as the
most useful ones. Finally, some respondents indicated that the feedback tool can support the
interaction between user and the developing team of the platform to report and solve bugs and
functional problems (32%).
4 CONCLUSIONS
The SlideWiki platform builds on the wisdom, creativity and productivity of the crowd for the co-
creation of educational content. SlideWiki empowers communities of educators and learners to author,
share and re-use educational content in a collaborative way. The SlideWiki project is improving the
platform and conducting a number of pilots of the platform within different case studies and learning
contexts. The purpose of these ongoing pilots is to raise awareness about SlideWiki, as well as collect
feedback from different communities of learners and educators. This feedback is being used to further
improve the platform in order to better meet the needs of its users.
Feedback received from the pilots so far indicates that the SlideWiki platform offers a particularly
promising outlook in the field of web-based learning, and more specifically in the area of OERs. The
various functionalities offered by the platform have the potential to promote the wider use of OERs in
education. In the context of these pilots, a number of issues have also been identified for further
improving the user experience offered by SlideWiki. The SlideWiki project will continue to engage
communities of learners and educators in order to acquire further insights into their needs and
requirements, as well as how to better accommodate them.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under grant agreement No 688095 (SlideWiki).
REFERENCES
[1] S. Auer, A. Khalili, and D. Tarasowa, "Crowd-sourced Open Courseware Authoring with
SlideWiki. org," International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET), vol. 8, pp.
62-63, 2013.
[2] A. Mikroyannidis, "Collaborative OpenCourseWare Authoring: The SlideWiki Platform," in
Proc. EdMedia: World Conference on Educational Media and Technology, Amsterdam,
Netherlands, 2018, pp. 37-39.

[3] D. E. Atkins, J. S. Brown, and A. L. Hammond, "A Review of the Open Educational Resources
(OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities," The William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation 2007.
[4] A. Lane, T. Connolly, G. Ferreira, P. McAndrew, and T. Wilson, "Reusing, reworking and
remixing open educational resources," in Cases 'n' Places: Global Cases in Educational and
Performance Technology, Educational Design and Technology in the Knowledge Society, S.
Marshall and W. Kinuthia, Eds. Charlotte, NC: IAP - Information Age Publishing, 2010.
[5] T. Wilson, R. Schuwer, and P. McAndrew, "Collating global evidence of the design, use, reuse
and redesign of open educational content," in Open Educational Resources 2010 (OER10).
Cambridge, United Kingdom http://oro.open.ac.uk/21122/, 2010.
[6] A. Mikroyannidis, "Collaborative Authoring of Open Courseware with SlideWiki: A Case Study
in Open Education," in Proc. 10th Annual International Conference on Education and New
Learning Technologies (EDULEARN18), Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 2018.
[7] C. Jones, "Theories of learning in a digital age," in Proc. Networked Learning, 2015, pp. 47-
78.
[8] H. Jenkins and M. Ito, Participatory culture in a networked era: A conversation on youth,
learning, commerce, and politics: John Wiley & Sons, 2015.
[9] M. Ito, K. Gutiérrez, S. Livingstone, B. Penuel, J. Rhodes, K. Salen, J. Schor, J. Sefton-Green,
and S. C. Watkins, Connected learning: An agenda for research and design: BookBaby, 2013.
[10] P. Rorabaugh, "Hybridity, pt. 1: Virtuality and Empiricism," Hybrid Pedagogy, 2012.
[11] P. Rorabaugh and J. Stommel, "Hybridity, pt. 3: What Does Hybrid Pedagogy Do?," Hybrid
Pedagogy, 2012.
[12] J. Stommel, "Hybridity, pt. 2: What is Hybrid Pedagogy?," Hybrid Pedagogy, 2012.
[13] M. Weller, Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn't feel like victory: Ubiquity
Press, 2015.