Hurdles

Hurdles to overcome

Note: safety is a recurrent theme here

Hurdles for students

• fear of saying something stupid (maybe the student would prefer to remain anonymous or use a different user name)
• fear of the technical requirements
• co-creation (especially in large groups) comes at a considerable moderation cost
• students might still prefer to make their course notes by hand, preventing a lot of notes and feedback from reaching the platform
• the solution we offer should not create yet more fragmentation of the course material.
• the solution we offer should actually benefit the students, but do they really experience these benefits? (often, the best study methods are actually the ones you feel worse about as a student)
• social media still gets the most traffic, how will we be able to get the conversation on social media back to the course (is this even our objective or do we want to go towards a sort of integration)
• it should be clear when the course is complete (if the course is changing throughout the semester, how will I know I'm not missing out on anything?)
• balance between incentivizing the students and undermining their intrinsic motivation
• balance between offering opportunities and allowing students to shape their own learning trajectory
• some students might prefer to remain passive during the lectures, so a more active teaching style might require a gradual build-up
• when the course is very diverse, students are less required to actively search for additional material
• a diversified course might scare students off, instead this diversified material should be rolled out in different phases
• having a lot of notes sticking to a course at the start of the semester is not a good idea: instead, either directly implement suggestions in the course or discard them when forking a new course for the next year.

Hurdles for teachers

• fear of the technical requirements
• fear of apparent incompetence (e.g. when slides/course are accessed outside the UGent or even by UGent colleagues; this might be more of a problem for beginning staff who are uncertain about their expertise or when you're required to teach a course outside of your main area of interest.)
• fear of plagiarism (e.g., slides/course are used by other person without receiving credit)
• fear of violation of intellectual property laws (e.g., when using material in your course without the necessary references)
• perceived loss of possible (monetary) gain (i.e., in case of making the slides public and someone uses your slides, someone is benefiting from you work for free. So they can actually further their career at the expense of you time investment without a clear benefit for you personally.)
• harder to engage and surprise the students when the material is already available in advance (basically, when you put the material online before the course, your lecture should contain new material to keep the students engaged or should focus more on group discussion)
• fear of being judged (e.g., will the feedback that is publicly generated by the course affect my evaluation for a promotion? What about the reward structure?)
• even if their is useful material of other professors online, I just want to make my own course (so what's the point of sharing my slides when the chances are small they will actually be used?)
• teachers with little technological expertise might be overwhelmed by ambassadors that are highly skilled (as the pioneers that we are currently bringing together). Therefore, training a teacher with little technical skills might result in a much more convincing and effective ambassador towards the larger population of teachers.
• the solution we offer should not create yet more fragmentation of the course material.
• teachers don't believe in the relevance of co-creation by the students (do the students have any valuable input?)
• teachers don't like to be judged on their teaching (especially when it's not their main job)
• when a GitHub system is tracking the changes made to a course, it doesn't look good when a course is not being updated frequently enough (increased accountability)
• dealing with the input of the students is time-consuming
• fear of losing control and final responsibility
• how to incentivize professors?
• how to keep your audience engaged when the course material is already online? Actually, the time spent in the auditorium should offer something on top of the course notes. This means it required an additional effort by the professor to diversify the course material or to actively engage with the students.
• discussion on the online course should be followed by some feedback during the lecture (terugkoppelingsmomenten)
• the transition from Latex to WebSlides is logical (more dynamic platform), but is there an easy converter?
• are there any other ways to facilitate conversion from e.g. powerpoint to WebSlides (hard because of the graphical layout)
• actually there is no need for being scared of intellectual property right infringements. The WebSlides or Jupyter courses are as safe as any other course. the security is not built into the course, it is built into the key to access the course (the CAS system).
• there are many different kinds of slides and slides are used in various ways (e.g., from a set of pictures to illustrate a story to a text-heavy summary of the course), is there any territory we are not covering?

Hurdles for the UGent

• intellectual property issues
• due to cuts in budgets, the existing networks of expertise between the UGent and its partners (e.g. Artevelde Hogeschool) have come to a stop. Now we're on our own again.

Other hurdles

• currently, we have two components that we like: the annotations on the one hand and the versatile courses on the other hand. However, as of yet there is no good implementation that connects the two.
• increased ICT possibilities lead to material fragmentation
• increased ICT possibilities still need to be used in a way that makes educational sense (e.g., delay feedback as much as little as possible, engage students actively (watching a video instead of reading a text is not necessarily an activity))
• keep balance between providing students with opportunities and allowing them to shape their own learning strategies (autonomy)