Where is Crowducate heading to?

Answer: Where ever you want it to! We received some feedback from different channels, mostly from our feedback forum, Github issues and some via emails, twitter and other forums. So, this is the roadmap (i.e., features) for the near future. I want to pick one specific email from Adam Heidebrink (@adamheid) whom I contacted after reading his article on Hybrid Pedagogy called Learning Beyond Limits: Open Source Collaboration in the Classroom. Adam’s excellent answer via email is very representative to analyze what features should be implemented next in Crowducate. Here’s an excerpt (I asked for his permission): My comments after “//” and in red.

• “Collaborative tools – how or where can users talk about why they copied/forked a particular class? How do you support multiple users who want to work together to set up a course?”
  // Commenting why people send a change request and/or reject it, is definitely crucial. The other feature he mentions is having multiple admins per course. Both are on our to-do list. Right now, there’s a workaround. If you want to comment on your change request write “//” and then your comment. If the course creator accepts your change request, she has to delete the text after “//” manually.
• “Currently, courses are geared towards individual use, which might be isolating or diminish the sense of community.. While this works great for certain types of learning, such as a step-by-step tutorial, it doesn’t allow for interaction between multiple users (and discussion is such a huge part of learning, in my opinion).”
  // Agreed. At the moment, with our scarce resources at hand, we just added discussion forums where people can share and discuss thoughts. Users can open new threads for each course. This is far away from the optimal solution but should work fine in the beginning.
• “Examples of how proficient the platform is at handling multimedia.”
  // As Markdown language is used, the platform can easily be used for embedding videos or images. Check this post how to do it. Other form of multimedia is not supported, yet (e.g. slides). 
• “Ranking system – once the site hits a critical mass of classes (especially forked classes) it will be important to have users upvoting and downvoting particular versions of the course to help organize the content on the site.”
  // One of the most requested features. This is on top of the list. 
• “Quiz functionality – consider a way of displaying the answers of others who have submitted after they have finished, especially once the functionality is increased to have short answers and such.”
  // The whole quiz functionality is very primitive at the moment. It takes some time until other answers will be shown but more answering are coming (e.g. true or false; fill in the blanks etc.)

Adam plans to create a short intro course about how to write academic papers. He generally likes the idea of blurring the lines between teacher and student:

“I have always thought that the open education movement could learn a lot from the open source programming community.I am curious to see how much the request change function gets used in a highly populated class. I think [copying/forking courses] will allow localized versions of courses that make more sense for particular audiences..Continuing my example from above, if another instructor came across the academic writing tutorial course, s/he could easily adapt that material to more closely align with his/her course goals.”

That’s exactly the idea. If the critical mass is reached, copying courses quickly allows producing industry-specific courses, or courses in different languages, as you have immediately a course base (the copied course) to start with. On the other hand, the change request function allows specific courses to get better and better in an incremental and iterative sense as students might give quick suggestions while consuming the course.

I just stumbled upon more great feedback regarding Crowducate. Rochelle Nicole’s (@RochelleNicole7) covers Crowducate on three main posts:

1. http://rochellenicole7.blogspot.de/2014/06/hrd-5507-post-5-crowducate.html
2. http://rochellenicole7.blogspot.de/2014/06/hrd-5507-post-8-more-about-crowducate.html
3. http://rochellenicole7.blogspot.de/2014/06/hrd-5507-post-10-even-more-about.html

Rochelle actually suggested the most wanted feature request according to our feedback forum:   “Give the original creator of a course credit if a course is copied.” Besides voting, this is also on out top list and allows to build up an online reputation (1) and to find out where similar instructors can be found. It’s great to see that most ideas resonate with our vision for Crowducate.

You have more suggestions or ideas for the roadmap? Comment on this post or put in the feedback forum. You know some good coders, designers etc. who might want to help? Send them to our open source Github repository (where the whole source code is hosted).

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Image Credit: Autumn Walk by Natalyia Kalinina