OpenEdu — the Data Science Project For Social Good at deploy(impact) 2022
We at women++ are on a mission to increase diversity in tech in Switzerland by facilitating hands-on tech project experience for those women transitioning into the tech industry or wishing to upskill and lead their careers in tech.
deploy(impact) is our latest initiative, a software development project for social good. A program that brings together the collaboration of industry leaders as #mentors, tech enthusiasts of all levels, including women transitioning to the tech sector, and project owners that guide the development of software solutions to impact a social cause.
As a participant, deploy(impact) is the perfect opportunity to learn by doing how to develop a product from A to Z, following an agile workflow of a product’s full life-cycle: from business requirements definition to delivering an MVP.
“OpenEdu” by Wikimedia CH is the chosen #datascience project that deploy(impact) participants will work on during the 6 one-week sprints. But what exactly is OpenEdu? What problem is trying to solve and how deploy(impact) 5 project teams will help bring this project forward? We invite you to read on to find out the answers to these questions…
First, what is OpenEdu?
OpenEdu is a platform launched in 2020 by Wikimedia CH to support, disseminate and promote projects, training tools, and news from the world of open education. Many international and Swiss partners like EPFL, Universität Zürich, ETH Zürich, Wikidata, Wikimedia Foundation, Wiki Education, OpenStreetMap, and Université de Neuchâtel recognized the need for it and have joined forces to provide a high-level selection of projects, training, and events to the education stakeholders.
What is the problem OpenEdu is solving?
Switzerland has a decentralized Education system, where every canton and even city has the autonomy to create its own educational material, which can lead to communication and collaboration barriers between schools, institutions, research departments, and teachers. OpenEdu was originally created so that teachers could share materials with other teachers across the country and get a new perspective. While that is still very much at the core of OpenEdu, Wikimedia CH has decided to go one step further and include training to support #lifelonglearning for teachers on how to use digital tools in the classroom.
How will deploy(impact) participants help OpenEdu achieve that?
OpenEdu is the flagship project within Wikimedia CH for the current year and its updated version is expected to be released to the public in 2023, after deploy(impact) participants have created an ontology to represent Open Education Resources (OER) in Wikimedia considering the inclusion of resources from like-minded associations and partners.
It is a Knowledge Management System, not a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) or Learning Management system, and deploy(impact) teams will focus mainly on the tools’ backend rather than the finished front-end tool. After deploy(impact) project teams present their solutions on November 19, at a virtual event open to the public, Wikimedia CH will continue to work on further developing the solution.
In plain terms, the deploy(impact) data science teams will create and propose a solution to organize and structure all the data on OpenEdu in order to avoid material duplication and promote collaboration among the education communities. The current solution is on Django (Python) using PostgreSQL, however, deploy(impact) data science teams have the freedom to propose alternative frameworks.
As optimal requirements, Wikimedia CH has expressed an interest in implementing a moderation tool where Wikimedia moderators can approve the content before publishing, which would be very useful to attest to the quality of the trainings offered on the platform.
Another optional requirement is the implementation of crawlers (or similar) to discover content in existing catalogs, such as Research gate, and import it into the platform OpenEdu. Innovative ways to make the content discoverable and uploadable to the tool, are also nice to have requirements.
Many participants that are currently doing their Ph.D. or masters got excited about this project because they see in real life how this project is needed and could benefit all the stakeholders in education in Switzerland.
Ilario Valdelli will act as the Project Owner on behalf of Wikimedia CH, giving feedback to the 5 data science project teams on bi-weekly PO feedback sessions.
We are glad to partner with Wikimedia CH for this project and we are confident that between the motivated interdisciplinary teams and the mentorship available from tech experts from sponsoring companies, the teams will deliver a viable solution by the end of the 6 one-week sprints.
To stay up to date on the unfolding of deploy(impact) stay tuned on our social media channels where we will be sharing more details about the program as it happens.
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