SlideWiki

“SlideWiki is an online slideshow tool and educational platform that offers users the chance to create and collaborate on slides, assessments, and to share content as structured open educational resources using Creative Commons license” – slidewiki.org

SlideWiki is an online authoring platform, designed to offer users a mechanism for creating, collaborating, and sharing Open Educational Resources. It is a tool that opens the door to further possibilities in education and is available for everyone. The features of this platform includes the following:

• Creating online slide decks
• Reusing educational content
• Collaborating with content writers
• Supporting knowledge sharing for communities

SlideWiki allows anyone to create presentations for any audience in an open online environment. It can be used in classrooms and boardrooms, on social media and most devices. Its primary aim is to educate anyone on a variety of subjects.

Klaas Andries de Graaf, a developer on the SlideWiki team, stated that “The goal of SlideWiki is to revolutionize how educational materials can be authored, shared and reused. We aim to provide widely available, accessible, multilingual, timely, engaging and high-quality educational material (that is OpenCourseWare). “

Klaas Andries de Graaf is with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, a partner institution in the SlideWiki project. Together with his colleagues from the KRR research group, they are the technical lead in the development operations team and performing trials by using SlideWiki in education.

The benefits of using this platform are its ease of operation and flexibility. It is relevant in diverse ways to different types of users. With its next-generation structure, SlideWiki makes it possible to import presentation slides from various formats (PPTX, ODP, HTML, copying and pasting from programs such as MSWord or Powerpoint). More importantly, it also supports exporting or embedding in multiple learning management systems via the  SCORM standard or in the e-book format epub. The slides can also be viewed offline via HTML (with reveal.js player included) or are available as PDF download.

Academic presentations in particular are often the result of a team effort. As it is extremely tedious to send large-sized presentation files back and forth, online authoring environments offer an attractive alternative. In SlideWiki, collaborative editing of slides is supported via user groups. These groups record the social activities around slide creation. Pictures, code snippets, videos, audio elements, websites, and API specifications can also be added to the slides. SlideWiki itself can be embedded on other platforms or sites.

SlideWiki uses Microservice architecture, which supports distributed development, increases scalability, and allows for easy interconnection to other online systems, which can connect and collaborate with SlideWiki. The platform is OpenSource, allowing other developers around the world to contribute to SlideWiki’s developments well as commercialization by other parties.

Future developments on SlideWiki include the following:

• Multilingual decks/semi-automatic translation/ synchronization of content between translated versions.
• Learning analytics and Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) support.
• Content recommendation and personalization.
• E-learning with self-assessment questionnaires.

In conclusion, developer Klaas Andries de Graaf further stated: “We are in full development, nearing initial completion of this EU Project by December this year.”

Hundreds of users are already part of the platform SlideWiki. It is free, and so are the materials available on it. Every new user adds to the existing content and thus enhances the platform’s value. The developer team also welcomes any suggestions for improvements to make SlideWiki even better.