Student-led collections on discipline topics

OB3 provides a unified interface and functionality for students, lecturers, and tutors to co-create media-rich document projects, including student-led collections on discipline topics. This type of collaborative activity promotes active learning and engagement in asynchronous online distance education, with projects that can be completed within a single academic semester.

By enabling document sharing among multiple users, OB3 allows students to collaborate and create content together. This gives teachers a platform to provide students with opportunities to contribute meaningfully to course evolution and improvement (See Petsoglou & Stoop, 2020, p. 39).

  • A lecturer or tutor provides the topic
  • Students add content to the document (headings, paragraphs, images, videos, etc.)
  • OB3 highlights each student’s contribution with colour-coded lines
  • Content and collaboration are assessed
  • Contributed content can become part of curriculum after review
  • Collections can be shared with alumni

Students have significant decision-making control within a framework provided by academic staff, allowing them to influence the shaping of an educational resource. After content review and approval, these document collections may become part of the curriculum. Collections can also be shared with alumni (if desired and permitted by an institution's policies). OB3 alumni access is provided at no cost.

The following practices (see Gomez et. al. 2022, 2017) exemplify effective student-staff curriculum co-creation as described by Bovill (2013), who notes that such collaborations "frequently involve a student studying a topic/problem that is of particular interest, and requires them to develop a deep approach to learning and investigation of their chosen topic" (p. 465).

A kind of “Wikipedia” for the Optics topic

The Optics wiki pages are collaborative documents created by students in the University of Sydney's Master of Ophthalmic Science program, which is designed for fully remote completion.

While lecturing staff provide the topics, students are responsible for all content development. The process occurs in two phases: first, students develop content for their assigned wiki page over a six-week period; second, during another six-week period, all students review and provide links between documents. Though online collaboration initially required encouragement from staff, participation has improved over time. Both content quality and collaborative effort are assessed.

The project aims to create a reliable, encyclopedic resource specific to the Optics topic that current students and alumni can access for their learning and careers. This student-led project "has been created to address the issue that this kind of content online or in other wiki pages is not reliable. There is a lot of bad content and it is not specific to what the students need for their career or for their learning as a high-level subject course." (p. 3324)

Between January 2017 and September 2018, students co-created 138 wiki entries. This collection has been made available to subsequent student cohorts as part of the ophthalmic optics curriculum.

Midwifery history accounts

In the first year of the Bachelor of Midwifery program at Ara Institute of Canterbury (New Zealand), students are introduced to the history of midwifery as a component of exploring the epistemological perspectives of midwifery. Working in small groups of 3-4, students are assigned scenarios from a specific historical period. They research the period and develop and educational resource as an OB3 page related to midwifery practice.

Students collaborate remotely to prepare materials which are punctuated with questions for their colleagues so that they are able to directly engage and interact with the materials online. This approach facilitates the addition of new thoughts, insights, and further questions from both co-developers and their fellow students. After submitting their online materials, students can address significant points raised during follow-up Zoom meetings.

This early introduction to co-design and development provides students with a greater working knowledge of the OB3 software while developing skills as broad as pedagogical reasoning to copyright literacy.

The program's theoretical components are delivered online and asynchronously, making this student-led collaborative assignment an integral part of the educational experience.

Resources informing this article