The SlideWiki EU project started 2016 with seventeen partners from Europe and Brazil using the award-winning open-source SlideWiki platform from germany as a basis. All project goals aiming at creating a large scale accessible learning and teaching platform using educational technology, skill recognition and global collaboration.
A major obstacle to increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education in Europe is the lack of widely available, accessible, multilingual, timely, engaging and high-quality educational material (i.e. OpenCourseWare). The creation and maintenance of comprehensive OpenCourseWare (OCW) is tedious, time-consuming and expensive, with the effect that often courseware employed by teachers, instructors and professors is incomplete, outdated, dull and inaccessible to those with disabilities.
SlideWiki is one of the major EU approaches to tackle these problems and to provide a free and libre OCW platform with free and libre OCW content. On the basis of the award winning (OpenCourseWare Consortium’s Excellence Award in 2014) software project SlideWiki, that is already used by hundreds of educators and thousands of learners, as well as with the help of 17 international partners from all over europe, we will extend SlideWiki’s approach to learning content creation and sharing to a next level. Thus, SlideWiki is planned to become a free to use, modern and global software that helps learners to find accessible learning content, share their insights and contribute improvements, as well as to help educators to create great learning content, reuse superior content of others and to reach out to a large amount of learners. In the end, we want to become the default hub for learning content, similar to what Wikipedia has achieved with encyclopedias today.