Technical platform and ideas for distributed collaboration Athens, 22.3.2016 Harri Toivonen Joona Kurikka joona.kurikka@cern.ch

Background

We have been running student projects with a potential to change the world (CBI) CBI has been limited by size of IdeaSquare to 50 students for each round, twice a year. How could we reach more people & more potential?

Platform for Massive Open Online Projects (MOOP) inspired by fundamental research, engineering and academy First pilot projects with students: Designing a commercially viable supersonic airplane Designing and constructing nanosatellites for society-driven challenges

How? Modular approach with three main MOOP components Remote learning (MOOC) Collaboration tools Collection and integration of project material Based on our experiences with CBI and other student projects, these 4 areas are the most important ones – more about each

Remote learning (MOOC)

An extensive collection of learning material; partially produced by our collaboration partners and partially linking to external resources like existing teaching material, external online courses etc. Piloted with CBI, http://learn.cbi-course.com (Open edX) We can set up a MOOC platform for sharing online teaching material for the supersonic airplane Question: How many students do we want to engage during the first year? Suggestion: starting with a limited environment, max. a few hundred active students

The teaching was done with a MOOC platform we customized for our own use, using parts from open source projects like Open edX. The material was produced together with teachers from the participating universities and shared to all of the students.

Experts on their own fields from different universities

Collaboration & collaboration tools

Multidisciplinary participation & open collaboration between the project areas, breaking the silos Questions: How to link with project courses or curriculum in the Universities? Encouraging international student collaboration or focusing on local participation? Handling of individual contributions (e.g. thesis work, calculations, designs)? Level of participant info to share with other people on the platform? (e.g. discipline, background, name? Students create their own profiles?)

Modular toolset for active, multidisciplinary project work Leveraging existing alternatives like Slack, Git(hub), Google Drive, Zenodo, Skype… Also tools to help the students to connect with external experts and wide audience for ideas, feedback and crowdsourcing. Collaboration with CERN IT Video, data storage, server hosting... Piloting new collaboration tools for wider CERN audience Based on CBI & our experiences so far, we would recommend leveraging existing collaboration tools, both commercial and open source alternatives. The idea is to plan the platform structure as modular and flexible as possible to allow integrating new tools when needed, and also allow the early-adapting students to use what tools they see best.

Collection and integration of project material

Minimum level: Collecting all the submissions to open, publicly accessible archive (e.g. CERN Open Hardware License) Templates and APIs to help people to document various project parts (like physical parts of a supersonic airplane & code running them) and develop them further. Content review and evaluation under each WP Supporting intercommunication and idea exchange between WPs

Automatic reporting, tagging by content, discussions, forking and creating new versions of the submissions Project contributions – each participant could get a certificate on his/her work on the project based on the submitted quality & quantity, and the time spent working on the project. Big picture of the project – visualizing the timeline on completion & overview to the content