Co-created Interactive Courseware

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 ownprogress, 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.