Shaping the Future of Education through Open Innovation

On the 22nd and 23rd of March, 30 students, 15 teachers and 30 professionals (education experts, designers, entrepreneurs and programmers) came together to test new digital initiatives at the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz. We were highly impressed by the engaged participants, visionary initiatives and valuable results of the first Open Education Hackdays prototype!

11 Relevant Projects

Within only 24 hours we managed to collaboratively develop 11 new projects that help the school community to benefit from new technologies and digitisation:

Global School: Connect the school more strongly with the professional world.
Tournament for Digital Balance: Enable students & schools to visualise & reflect their internet time both individually and collectively
Data Literacy: Explore your internet habits with open data in a safe and accessible way.
Personal Learning Data Logbook: Enable students to record and use their learning data in a secure way.
Individual Speed of Learning: Use analytics to evaluate students and enable them to learn in their own speed.
Learning Nomads: Create a concept that allows students to learn outside from school and/or connect more strongly with the outside world.
Flip Teaching Action: Enable teachers to create digital classes in order to create more room for discussions and questions in the classroom.
OER Repository: Developing a first prototype of an Open Educational Resources (OER) Repository
Sport, Sleep, Achieve: Helping students to understand the effect of sport & sleep on their mental state.
Self-Developed 3D Learning Simulations: Enable teachers & students to create their own virtual reality chemistry classes.
Student Feedback: Enable students to give appropriate feedback to teachers.

Help us Incubating these Initiatives

We’ll try our best to make most of these initiated projects come to life, at the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz and / or other schools. If you’re interested in support us in this endeavor (as a school, expert or sponsor), please reach out to us via info@opendata.ch.

Excited & Engaged Participants

During the Hackdays we collected quotes from all types of participants to improve our understanding of their experience and takeaways:

Pupil at the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz (LAZ): “At the Hackdays I am learning how to cooperate with all of my teammates. In our group we have 3 elderly men, who are way much more mature. We learned how to communicate effectively and express our ideas. Even if they are older, we are cooperating and respecting each other. I never experienced this before.”
Teacher at the LAZ: “We should do this more often. Sit together, externals, students, staff and talk about the future. Even though we do this all the time. But it’s a different setting. I appreciate the different ideas from the students in my group. They have visions. It’s something else than seeing them in my classroom.”
Researcher working at Labster (an EdTech Startup): “I’m a researcher. I want to know how users interact with technology. We brought a piece of technology here and tested it on users [students and teachers] to see how it works. I realised, this tool that we developed is much more difficult than I anticipated. If you use a tool internally you don’t realise how others are perceiving. At the same time, I was very surprised how well especially the students were able to use the tool and benefit from it in new ways.”
Programmer from ETH: “I’m bored by traditional learning environments and much more fascinated by the possibility of learning in digital classrooms. At these Hackdays, I met a lot of inspirational people: Designers, Coders, Entrepreneurs and students! Everyone is very open here. Everybody feels equal. Plus, I can practice my back end skill.”

Our Next Events

Next week, we’ll present the learnings and results of the Hackdays in front of relevant stakeholders at the following two events:

5th of April: Workshop @ SLK-Brunnensymposium (training event for Zurich’s school principals
6th of April: Workshop @ Open Education Day in Bern

Visual Impressions

If you missed the first Open Education Hackdays or want to reminisce about the 2 exciting day, take advantage of a few snapshots taken by various parties: