#LearnHack, a hackathon around improving education at UCL
On the 4th of June, UCL’s Information Services Division ran the second iteration of #Learnhack together with us, TechSoc.
The event was a great success with everybody having a lot of fun building things to improve the way we learn and generally experience education.
Even though the attendee numbers more than doubled compared to the last LearnHack, the wonderful culture of community and collaboration remained and people were more than willing to help each other with the many different things they were all doing.
Here are some of the projects that came out of the hackathon:
MIrTaL
Mirtal integrates medical imaging data into Moodle to facilitate innovative learning and teaching of medical imagery.
The team is already thinking about how they can develop this project further.
Virtually Real
Using VR to provide an immersive learning environment for languages. It’s interactive, responsive and immersive rather than a static vocabulary exercise. It gives the potential for real-time interaction with a tutor or native speaker. It takes a VR model UI that can work and stretches it further to make it more widely applicable across subjects.
They have started a conversation with the UCL Digital Education team to scope out the potential of collaborative VR projects.
Baseline Check
Inspired by the e-Learning Baseline guide to enhancing e-learning provision, we’ve come up with a browser plug-in to help Moodle editors (= people) check their websites are accessible — and show them how to fix the elements that don’t meet required standards. This will save staff time and provide students with a more consistent and accessible online experience.
This team is also already talking to various colleagues in a variety of departments to deploy this project on the UCL Moodle.
Eyegazers
Using eye tracking to validate learner experiences of learning content; how eye tracking can be used with other information / analytics to perform interventions / adaptive learning
You can try it out here: https://eye-track.hugodf.xyz/. It’s also open source.
Project LAF
FutureLearn courses produce a lot of data of which some makes sense and some does not. We wanted to understand more about learners, those who complete the course and what insight we could find, which might help future runs and future course designs.
There is a lot of potential with this project as well, which is why this team has also chosen to develop it further.
UCL Distance
Shows you the closest UCL building based on your location and your distance to it.
You can try it for yourself here, here, and here.
LearnHack was a lot of fun for all of us involved in a broad variety of ways and we want to thank everybody who made it awesome.
Hope to see you all again at #LearnHack 3 in autumn.
