Building Tools for Our Needs
As educators ourselves, our motivation comes from the limitations of the existing tools at our disposal, specifically:
- Not having access to our colleagues’ syllabi.
- Not having tools that support the process of authoring and maintaining syllabi.
- Having to use presentation software that fall short for educational purposes.
Siloed Knowledge
Hindered access to our colleagues’ syllabi.
Counterintuitively, given today’s technology, there still exists no platform on which educators can publish and browse the syllabi they have created for their classes. Virtually every Learning Management Systems (LMS) deployed by leading education institutions do not allow for the open sharing of syllabi content. This is especially ironic given that academia is, by and large, a field that prizes open sharing and collaborative progress.
If teachers wish to share syllabi they have authored outside of the confines of institutional LMS, they may theoretically do so independently. Some educators resort to self-publishing their syllabi, often on one-off microsites. However, these sites, being highly decentralized, unstandardized and often tedious to maintain, are difficult to index meaningfully. For the systematic browsing of syllabi, an open standard for the formatting of curricula is necessary. Unfortunately, while an open standard does exist for formatting curricula, the adoption of this standard is so poor that most educators have never heard of the Common Cartridge (CC) format.
BORROWED, RATHER THAN BESPOKE, TOOLS
.docx vs. Synthesis
A need for tools that support the process of creating syllabi.
Syllabi may, and often do, evolve over time, as the need to abridge or expand upon material arises depending on a course’s format, delivery or audience. The work of authoring and maintaining syllabi is hardly linear; it is often a lateral and iterative creative process. Educators are left to hop between several tools to support different aspects of their workflow.
.pptx vs. Improv
Having to utilize presentation software that fall short in pedagogical settings.
Furthermore, there is often much improvisation and tailoring during the delivery of the course material itself. For example, in the course of a class, notes are being taken, diagrams drawn, websites visited, etc. This creates a problem because the word processors and slideware that educators use were hardly designed for such styles of conversational presentation, let alone bundling of such distributed and dynamic content.
The Challenges
We work on this project because we believe that there can, and should, be tools that better suit the specific needs of educators. It is a vast endeavour, so we’ve broken it down into smaller components.
CHALLENGE 1:
Enable Access: There is no public repository of syllabi.
Currently, the curricula designed by educators are too often locked away behind the walls of proprietary software and institutional accounts. Despite the fact that educators typically own the IP rights to the course material they develop, there are few tools that specifically support the open sharing of syllabi between teachers.
In the spirit of the open science movement, the free circulation of academic materials benefits all; this is true of research materials, as well as for pedagogical materials.
CHALLENGE 1A:
Supporting Portability
A common format lays key groundwork for open exchange.
Delaying the adoption of such format(s) also jeopardizes the longevity of knowledge by hindering the viability of creating openly accessible repositories and/or archives.
PROJECT:
Common Cartridge Viewer Web App
The Common Cartridge (CC)Viewer Web App is an open source tool for viewing course materials in the CC format.
This tool allows users to utilize a common format for the publication and exchange of syllabi content.
CHALLENGE 1B:
Supporting Open Publication
Siloed resources hinder educators from having a macro-level visibility of their peers’ work across fields. Since many educators resort to publishing course materials on personal websites, discovering and consulting curricula developed by peers is an arduous task of navigating scattered, un-indexed resources.
The syllabi listings project aims to make syllabi accessible and meaningfully searchable.
PROJECT
Syllabi Listings
On Syllabi Listings, teachers can browse what their colleagues are teaching across the world, as well as publicly share their own syllabi.
Syllabi Listings will support Common Cartridge imports, as well as the upload of regular documents (docx, pdf) and links.
CHALLENGE 2:
Usability: Current software does not address syllabi writing and classroom teaching needs.
The everyday tools used by educators today are often not built with real-world classroom and pedagogical planning in mind. With the MultiModal project, our goal is to design for real-world practices around research, collaboration and pedagogy.
CHALLENGE 2A:
Supporting Syllabi Synthesis
Leading office tools today still implicitly carry the outdated assumptions on which early day office publishing software was based (e.g. flat hierarchy, strict separation between presenter and audience, isolated exports).
PROJECT
MultiModal Writer
Our goal is to create a tool that supports the non-linear, creative workflow of syllabi planning and publishing.
The tool will also include features such as managing syllabi across sections of students, and evolving course content over semesters.
Eventually, collaborative authoring will also be supported.
CHALLENGE 2B:
Supporting Classroom Teaching
OOur tools should support, rather than hinder, the spontaneity and variety of classroom interactions.
PROJECT
MultiModal Classroom
Classrooms are places of dynamic exchanges and conversation between students and instructors.
Existing slideware (e.g. Google Slides, Keynote, Powerpoint, etc.), do not support on-the-fly note taking or diagramming. If linked resources are used, there also arises a need to switch frequently between multiple windows and applications when preparing and presenting materials.
MM Classroom addresses those issues by merging the ease of use of traditional presentation software with context building features such as drawing, note-taking, structured document organization and hyperlinking.
ABOUT US
Contributors
Pierre Depaz (project founder) is an academic, developer and artist. He is currently lecturing at NYU Berlin, the Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad-Wolf and Sciences Po Paris, while completing his doctoral thesis on the aesthetics of code under the direction of Alexandre Gefen (Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Nick Montfort (MIT). His academic research revolves around how software systems create representational frameworks for inter- and intra-personal organization.
Tobias Schmidt is a freelance software engineer with a decade of experience of building software at Soundcloud and is an active contributor to the Prometheus and Kubernetes open-source ecosystems, amongst others. Over the last few years he has helped to integrate Prometheus in SoundCloud’s infrastructure and worked with product teams to deliver more reliable and secure software products.
Pat Shiu is a freelance UX engineer and the former Associate Director of Design at Rhizome, an arts organization that champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, digital preservation, and software development. At Rhizome, worked on the Webrecorder project, an open source suite of tools for web archiving.