Projekt:Wikipedia i utbildning 2014/Ansökan till Vinnova - Digitalisering för framtidens skola - Innovationsprojekt

Ansökan har avslagits.

Ansökan

Organisation: Vinnova: Digitalisering för framtidens skola

Sista ansökningsdatum: 4 juni, kl. 14.00

Max bidrag: N/A 1 322 290 kr sökt (totalt)

Bedömd chans: Låg – texten är främst en grund för kommande då vi inte hann jobba igenom den ordentligt tillsammans med SU

Väntevärde:

Värde för WMSE (1-5): 4 (högt)

Beslutsdatum: 30 september

Uppföljning inför inskick:

Mål (150 tecken)

Att ge elever och läraren en interaktiv lärmiljö som kopplar Wikipedia till läroplanen på ett strukturerat, trovärdigt och tillgängligt sätt.

Sammanfattning svenska (1 500 tecken)

Swedish Open School syftar till att öppna upp läroplanen med hjälp av Wikipedias innehåll och skapa en tillgänglig plattform som kontextualiserar lärandet för lärare och elever. I platformen kommer innehåll att struktureras och ge lärare och elever adekvat stöd och resurser för interaktion och deltagande i att skapa och dela ämneskunskap digitalt. Wikipedias omfattande resurs som kunskapskälla och framförallt som verktyg kommer att ge förutsättningar för att elever utvecklar nyckelkompetenser som kritiskt tänkande, kommunikativa kompetenser och digital litteracitet i en kontext som har tydlig koppling till ämnesplaner och skolans uppdrag enligt läroplanerna. Swedish Open School innebär en lärmiljö där elever också får möjlighet till självbedömning, kamratrespons och visa sina kunskaper i form av open badges. Öppenheten ligger både i att modellen är skalbar tack vare Wikipedias globala omfattning, och inte begränsad till att omfatta klassrumsaktivteter utan även det livslånga lärandet.

Sammanfattning engelska (1 500 tecken)

Swedish Open School aims to open up the curriculum using Wikipedia content and create an accessible platform which contextualises education for learners and teachers. In this platform, content will be structured and systematically aligned to the curriculum in order to provide a reliable support for teachers and a solid learning resource for learners. In using Wikipedia, students are introduced to sharing knowledge in participatory learning activities, developing critical thinking skills, communication skills, media and information literacy. The Swedish Open School will provide a learning environment where students can make use of a set of key learning tools, such as self-assessment, peer-assessment and they will be able to showcase their efforts and achievements with Open Badges. The openness of this project is manyfold; the model can easily be scaled due to the global extent of Wikipedia, and the Swedish Open School is not limited to classroom activities but a resource for lifelong learning for everyone.

Background

Performance in Swedish schools is worsening. A recent and relevant example of degrading school performance can be found in the most recent PISA test results (Skolverket, 2013). There are a number of contributing factors for this negative trend in school performance, but some key areas are 1) lack of teacher skills to use available digital resources, 2) students´ decreasing motivation for school work, and 3) limited transparency of school objectives, content, learning activities, and learning outcomes. Some examples of these three problem areas are outdated textbooks and limited teacher contact time, poorly motivated students and teachers, and parents with poor awareness of their child’s progress and goals for improvement.

To our knowledge there has been no other attempt to make the school curriculum fully available online and truly open for a whole nation. Sweden, with a world leading position in IT-infrastructure, has the potential to do it and our project brings the content, structure and methods for doing it. We believe our model will leapfrog schools in Sweden into real acquisition of the so called 21st century skills meeting the requirements of tomorrow regarding: 1) Core subjects, 2) Learning and innovation skills: creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, communication and collaboration, 3) Information, media and technology skills: information literacy, media literacy, ICT literacy, and 4) Life and career skills.

This project does not rely on untested technology or lack of content, it is focused on making sense of tools, technology and available content by structuring and aligning resources holistically with the school perspective in mind and by involving all teachers and students as co-creators in the process. A process that is much doable with the core competences in the team but time consuming. Without VINNOVA funding the completion of the project will be more haphazard, spread over a much longer time and have no clear end date.

Actors and resources

Wikimedia Sverige

For the last few years Wikimedia Sverige has actively worked on promoting Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool for teachers. Wikipedia is not only a free educational resource but also helps develop students’ critical thinking, writing skills and media and information literacy. Because this is achieved by connecting the classroom activity to the outside world, students are deeply engaged in their projects, feeling the extra benefit and added value from the prospect of gaining an audience and having others use their created resources (see e.g. Lange and Ito, 2009). Wikimedia Sverige is a nonprofit organization founded in 2007 and a local chapter of Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia. We at Wikimedia are experts on how to use wikis in an educational setting and how to build large, active online communities in order to provide free knowledge to everyone. Sara Mörtsell, former ICT teacher and the Education manager at Wikimedia Sverige will be the project manager and Dr. André Costa will work on technical parts in the project (extensions of the MediaWiki software for badges and the pool of learning material). The theoretical and technical know how for how to integrate badges is present in the project team. Wikimedia Sverige works in close cooperation with educational institutions all over Sweden.

Stockholms Universitet

With nearly 67,000 undergraduate and master's students, 1,800 doctoral students, 6,000 employees and a turnover of SEK 4.3 billion, Stockholm University (SU) is one of the largest universities in Sweden. SU is ranked as one of the top 50 Universities in Europe (one of the top 100 in the world). SU’s Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) cooperates with more than thirty universities and has participated in a large number of projects funded by EU, NIH, the World Bank, and other international and national agencies. DSV is placed in the Stockholm suburb of Kista and is an integral part of Kista Science City, which is one of the most advanced and leading ICT clusters in the world. DSV is one of the oldest and largest academic departments of ICT in Sweden. DSV has around 300 employees and more than 90 PhD students as well as approx. 6,500 registered students on the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels. DSV runs two of the largest Gaming programs in Sweden. The research activities of DSV span most fields over the entire spectrum of information and communication technology, from the rigor of Decision analysis and the applicability of Service architectures, over Sensor based systems, to the social impact of Technology enhanced learning.

Uno Fors is Professor in IT and Learning and Vice head of dept. DSV. Fors has been working with R&D in Virtual encounters and serious games for learning since more than 25 years, and has developed more than 10 Virtual patient and Virtual case systems. Fors has published more than 200 scientific journal and conference papers. Fors (when working at Karolinska Institutet) has been engaged in a number of EU-projects focusing on e-learning and interactive simulations for learning like EQUEL, ENSEL, EIPEN, EUREA, e-LERU and eViP as well as in NIH projects. Fors will, as a research experts within technology based learning, focus on the structuring of digital tools, with the alignment to the curriculum and evaluation.

Henrik Hanson is a docent at the Computer and Systems Sciences department. He will work on the method how to align content to the curriculum, the toolkit and the evaluation of the usage.

William Jobe is a PhD student at Stockholm University. His research primarily deals with ICT in developing countries with a focus on mobile educational technologies for massive open online learning with digital badges. William will focus on developing the badges and the method of how to align the curriculum.

Thashmee Karunaratne is a PhD in Data mining from Stockholm University, extending her research towards Educational Data mining, in addition to coordinating a SIDA funded collaboration for enhancing higher education with Rwanda. She will focus on the evaluation.

Market and potential

The Swedish Open School (SOS) is envisioned as an innovative, digital solution to the aforementioned issues. It will be a portal that directly connects and aligns the Swedish school curriculum to Wikipedia’s content in a way that is open, up to date and transparent to any interested party. Also all types of new material, including multimedia based learning applications can be linked into the SOS platform.

This portal will also provide an environment, where students in compulsory and upper secondary education can earn digital badges in order to show their achievements to their peers, parents, and teachers. The portal is designed in a way that will promote content consumption and creation. Teachers, parents, and administrative bodies can follow the progress of students learning. It enables teachers and parents to support students in an individualised and timely way. Furthermore, students’ collaborative learning in order to reach learning objectives will be greatly enhanced through peer assessment and feedback.

More specifically the objectives of the SOS project are to provide a national school resource portal for all schools in Sweden, with:

1. Selected relevant Wikipedia content aligned to all national curriculum goals.
2. A method and structure for content creation, updates, contextualisation and long term sustainability.
3. A transparent quality review process of the selected school content.
4. A toolkit for creating interactive lessons and active learning activities.
5. A pool of teaching and learning activities that are customizable and crowdsourced by teachers and/or students.
6. An accreditation system of acquired learning for both teachers and students based on open digital badges.
7. A method for follow up, monitoring and evaluation of portal activities using learning analytics.

The method will be generic enough to make it possible to also be used in different regions/municipalities/countries, by different ages of students and all school subjects. Our solution is globally scalable and completely sustainable. Sweden could be a frontrunner example for schools all around the world.

Development and innovation

The Swedish Open School will facilitate teachers to take advantage of this huge free educational resource. The aim is to make them feel empowered and supported so that they can teach their students how to successfully make use of all the possibilities Wikipedia, and crowdsourced information, has to offer. Despite the vast amount of information available there has never been any effort to try to align Wikipedia’s material into Swedish schools in a structured way. Especially new teachers can feel empowered to use suggested content, knowing that its high quality has been validated, and therefore we will involve teacher students and new teachers in the activities.

Due to the openness of the design, teachers themselves can help to improve, structure and customize their teaching resources together with their students to whom they can assign tasks. The work will become bidirectional with both content consumption and content creation in a sustainable model. Furthermore, since all edits to Wikipedia are transparent it’s easy to track any changes and developments. Educators will benefit from the support of a large and active community of Wikipedia experts to assure improvements.

The Swedish Open School will be accessible and transparent in a way that will benefit any learners interested in any course work at any time, such as preparing in advance and finding challenging material, which has been found to be one key impacts on students’ learning (Hattie, 2013).

Open Badges

A digital badge system is a nascent technology that intends to recognize, validate, and/or accreditize non-formal learning. One of the first and largest actors in this area is Mozilla with its Open Badges system (Surman, 2011). Digital badges allow badge owners to digitally show and publicize online an achieved knowledge or skill.

The innovation in this proposal is to design, create and implement a badge system into Wikimedia’s projects, in a way that it can be used by anyone in upper secondary school in Sweden. These badges will provide a means for students to show their learning achievements to anyone, inside of or outside of school. This system will also benefit Wikimedia projects in that the participants both consume and create content. This bidirectional flow of knowledge will provide better content for Wikimedia in the long term and provide both passive and active learning opportunities for the students. Finally, an open badge system used on Wikipedia in schools can provide increased motivation to students by providing a gamified environment where badge progress is transparent for all the users.

Significance of expected results and effects

The Swedish Open School is significant to the national school system on the part of both teachers and students. For teachers, the aligned and reviewed content makes up a reliable and useful source for updated and relevant course content; and for students, the connection between curriculum and content is accessible and transparent. Learning is enhanced by engaging students in participatory activities where content consumption and production coincide.

Learning is also benefited from the opportunities provided by feedback and accreditation available in the platform. Formative Assessment is a key instrument for teachers and studies show that students who prepare examinations by answering their own questions outperform students who prepare in a traditional way. The learning activities and feedback tool will therefore be designed so that both teachers and students can customize and share questions to fit their needs. Feedback is then available for anyone to be used for peer-assessment as well as self-assessment.

Evaluation

For analyzing, evaluating, and following up the activities of the proposed national school resource portal, including monitoring and evaluation of the quality of the resource updates and the portal usage, methods of learning analytics are proposed. In the general perspective, learning analytics has a great potential for improving the quality in education by simply examining the usage patterns of the automated systems used for learning and teaching purposes. In contrast to evaluation of the digital contents by the use of a questionnaire for the users, learning analytics allows use of real time data and performs continuous evaluations that could be used to explore, detect and predict improvements in learning. However, the amount, form and type of data available with respect to any automated system depend on the functionalities of it, so as the methods for learning analytics. The proposed national school resource portal contain data of user logs, interactive activities, etc. The following table describes the data that could be available in the proposed platform and possible learning analytics based on these data.

Data sets	Data
Editing logs of the wiki pages and Page visits	Visualization of the editing patterns (frequency, time). Quality review reports (includes editor profiles for the page). Page visits vs. Page edit patterns (content improvement assessment). Identify editing communities
Quizzes attempts/results	Analyses of successes of quizzes. Success rate per user – Individual learning assessmen
Learning activities	Quality of interaction with the portal
Content creation	Patterns of the contents evolvement
Process for digital badges	Visualization (and analyses) of requirements for individuals to earn different badges: 1) lead to model requirements for different badges; 2) predictions of whether an individual can earn a badge
Usage logs of the toolbox	What tools are on demand – identifying trends
Group activities	Popularity vs. success analysis
Cross-reference logs	Visualize reading/learning/reference styles
Download/sharing logs	Analysis of reuse (shows the quality/importance of the contents)

Implementation

The method of how to align the material with the curriculum will be created by SU and Wikimedia Sverige. A number of workshops will take place during the span of the project with input from a reference group drawn from within our networks. During these workshops, schools and teachers will create a few case studies where Wikipedia’s material has been aligned and quizzes have been created to make it clear and easier for other teachers to do it for their subjects/courses. Also, help pages and videos will be created here. The toolkit will be created jointly on an open platform where anyone interested can contribute. The pool of teaching and learning activities will mainly be developed by the project partners but with input from teachers and principals. The design and technical creation and implementation of badges will be done by Wikimedia Sverige and SU with input from a reference group drawn from within our networks. SU will have the main responsibility for the academic evaluation, assisted by Wikimedia Sverige on finding data.

Wikimedia Sverige has extensive experience from educators expressing a great interest in using Wikipedia in a productive way with students, to integrate assignments with creating content on Wikipedia. One example is our pilot study with the Swedish for Immigrants Program, in 2013 where we learnt that what teachers ask for is an accessible practical model for how to use Wikipedia with students which resulted in a step by step guide on Wikiversity.

Arbetspaket Start-Slut	Tidsåtgång (timmar)	Ansvarig	Övriga medverkande	Kostnad	VINNOVAS finansiering	Egen/annan finansiering
WP1 – Alignment and review 2015-01-01 – 2016-02-01	1372	Sara Mörtsell	Uno Fors, William Jobe, Henrik Hansson	939620	730980	WMSE: 99000, SU: 109640
WP2 – Tools and pool 2015-01-01 – 2015-12-31	767	Uno Fors	André Costa, Sara Mörtsell, William Jobe, Henrik Hansson	303687	84407	SU: 219280
WP3 – Open badges 2015-01-01 – 2016-06-30	1561	Sara Mörtsell	William Jobe, André Costa	564948	283208	WMSE: 99000, SU: 182740
WP4 – Evaluation 2016-01-01 – 2016-06-30	500	Uno Fors	Sara Mörtsell, Henrik Hansson	209222	63022	SU: 146200

Risks

There are two identified risks. First there is a risk that integrating the Open Badges system to MediaWiki might take a long time due to very thorough code review process (probability 3, consequence 4). The risk will be mitigated by early communication with Wikimedia Foundation developers and if necessary, set up a stand alone or use an existing Open Badge platform. The other risk is to not get a “critical mass” of teachers joining the project (probability 1, consequence 4). The risk will be mitigated by implementing a communication plan so that a large enough audience is reached and through active participation in suitable events where teachers, principals and/or students participate.

Plan for further exploitation and anchoring

Stockholm University and Wikimedia Sverige have a large network in the educational sector where the resources created during the project will be shared. Both organizations often participate in conferences, workshops etc. where this will be disseminated. Sharing the results and the resource will be an integrated part of the work done by Wikimedia Sverige’s full time Education Manager in the future.

A communication plan will be developed in the beginning of the project to coordinate the contacts with journalists and the use of social media.

Wikimedia Foundation has set aside a large amount of money to keep Wikipedia and the sister projects up and running for the foreseeable future. Hence, the material aligned with the curriculum will continue to be available. Also, all material created during the span of the project will be under a free license and can be copied by anyone at any time (something that is done frequently) and thus prevents it from ever being lost.