Student project led by Cory Salveson

Student round 2016/17 (offered funding but did not start)

For more information, please contact innovations@it.ox.ac.uk

ABSTRACT

Studious is the first digital platform designed specifically to enable learners to study the contents of syllabi in a collaborative, relational, and data-oriented way. Borrowing the best features of citation managers like EndNote and Mendeley, especially their ability to leverage the burgeoning scholarly data commons, the Studious platform will “unbundle” syllabi, transforming simple reading lists into semantically rich metadata. Studious will then enable students to collaboratively organize and synthesize syllabus metadata with derived resources like key terms, summaries, timelines, and more, bringing a social computing or “peer-production” approach to studying and revising. As proven by an experiment during Michaelmas Term 2016, these techniques enable the work of classroom learning to become more than the sum of its parts, resulting in more active, efficient, and creative learning for students.

The project itself will focus on creating a user experience that students will love, on a data platform that can serve as a foundation for additional functionality in the future: for institutions, faculty and staff, researchers, publishers, and the scholarly data commons generally. After piloting the system in a real class at Oxford, and engaging with diverse stakeholderse throughout its lifecycle, the project will conclude by producing a go-forward strategy for Studious using an open-source, organizational, or hybrid management model designed to achieve its broader mission. Built by and for Oxford, Studious should thus provide compelling benefit for students, even as it also positions the university to be a leader in bringing the classroom into the scholarly data commons and vice versa.