Overview of our first meetings

In the very first meeting of out team we discussed a little bit about our backgrounds and what the subject of our application could be. A topic that was mutually found interesting was the one of the educational sector. Making an application with a social aspect where the social itself would not be the purpose but a means to an end was actually something to motivate us into taking in into the next step.

So this initiated some interaction over the next meeting thinking about what it is that we could do actually. What was proposed,  was a web based application that could be utilized as a revision tool for students where the content just learned from the lecture could be revised through small exercises provided by the teacher. This could be a good way for teachers to add something extra in their lessons that could be more engaging for students, whilst monitoring the progress and the difficulties that their students face in class in order to adjust their lessons accordingly, when at the same time, students could get some direct feedback about what they’ve learned so far and what skills they need to improve.

A way of making this application stand out and in a way make it more social would be to add a crowd-sourcing element on it. And that would be by involving the students in the process by not just engaging through answering questions about the lecture, but also by adding ones for their peers. So the interesting thing was that through this application students could actually contribute to their own learning experience.

At that point some things seemed to be problematic about this whole concept:

Can they make their own questions?

The content of the questions should be controlled. That’s why after setting them and releasing them for answering they will not be available for the students to edit them until the next lesson. In the meantime teachers should be able to access them and standout the “good” ones from the “bad” ones concerning both questions and answers. In the next lessons questions will become available for re-editing and with the help of educational resources and of their teachers students will be able to well formed Q&As that could be re-used for their revision for a test or for acquiring information in general.

Cheating?

Well someone could say that someone could find the answer somewhere else and copy it, or even copy from another student. Some ways to limit that would be the access of the teachers to the questions for checking them and giving a time limit for providing an answer depending on the content of the question. Moreover they should not be able to pick the questions but they should come up randomly so that they won’t be copying the person next to them.

Is that going to make lessons better?

The data provided by this application could be valuable for teachers. They could find out about the performance of students in every subject and help them realize their strengthens and weaknesses, as well as which subjects seem to be more appealing to them. Furthermore teachers could compare results between classes. But this application is not intended to replace the regular lesson plans, but it will be a way to augment the lessons through using web technologies which can provide some really useful feedback.

Some further issues that were acknowledged but were left as some food for thought for the next meeting were the following:

Would that be a Wikipedia remaking for school children?

Will the whole application be treated as an exercise or as a game that will enable learning?

What can be done with all these feedback provided and how could it be used from teachers or schools in general?

Are they going to have to create a personalized account for using the application?

The whole concept initiated many ideas and along with that many restrictions as well, so it was left in the next meetings to specify it further or to adjust it so that it would become more clear what our application had to offer and how it would do it.