A major obstacle to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education in Europe is the lack of widely available, accessible, multilingual, timely, engaging and high-quality educational material (i.e. OpenCourseWare). The creation of comprehensive OpenCourseWare (OCW) is tedious, time-consuming and expensive, with the effect, that often courseware employed by teachers, instructors and professors is incomplete, outdated, inaccessible to those with disabilities and dull. With the open-source SlideWiki platform (available at SlideWiki.org) the effort of the creation, translation and evolution of highly-structured remixable OCW can be widely shared (i.e. crowdsourced). Similarly to Wikipedia for encyclopaedic content, SlideWiki allows (1) to collaboratively create comprehensive OCW (curricula, slide presentations, self-assessment tests, illustrations etc.) online in a crowdsourcing manner, (2) to semi-automatically translate this content into more than 50 different languages and to improve the translations in a collaborative manner and (3) to support engagement and social networking of educators and learners around that content. SlideWiki is already used by hundreds of educators, thousands of learners. Several hundred comprehensive course materials are available in SlideWiki in dozens of languages.
In this large-scale trial project, we will further mature the SlideWiki technology platform, integrate it with a state-of-the-art MOOC delivery platform and perform four large-scale trials in (1) secondary education, (2) vocational and professional training, (3) higher education and (4) community-driven open-education. Each of these large-scale trials will be performed with hundreds of educators and thousands of learners in countries all over Europe. A particular focus of the technology development and testing in the trials will be the suitability for academics, teachers and learners with disabilities.