A major obstacle to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education in Europe is the lack of widely available, accessible, multilingual, timely, engaging and high-quality educational material (i.e. OpenCourseWare). The creation of comprehensive OpenCourseWare (OCW) is tedious, time-consuming and expensive with the effect that often courseware employed by teachers, instructors and professors is incomplete, outdated, inaccessible to those with disabilities and dull.
With the open-source SlideWiki platform, the effort of the creation, translation and evolution of highly-structured remixable OCW can be widely shared (i.e. crowdsourced). Similarly to Wikipedia for encyclopaedic content, SlideWiki allows to collaboratively create comprehensive OCW (curricula, slide presentations, self-assessment tests, illustrations etc.) online in a crowdsourcing manner:
• to semi-automatically translate this content into more than 50 different languages and
• to improve the translations in a collaborative manner and
• to support engagement and social networking of educators and learners around that content.
The open-source and open-access platform SlideWiki.org won the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s Excellence Award in 2014 and is used by hundreds of educators and thousands of learners. Several hundred comprehensive course materials are available on SlideWiki in dozens of languages.
The SlideWiki large-scale trial project is further maturing the SlideWiki platform by integrating it with a state-of-the-art MOOC delivery platform and performing four large-scale trials in:
• secondary education,
• vocational and professional training,
• higher education and
• community-driven open education.
Each of these large-scale trials is performed with hundreds of educators and thousands of learners in countries all over Europe. A particular focus of the technology development and testing in the trials is the suitability for academics, teachers and learners with disabilities.
