At ChallengeHub, one of our key focusses is reducing the teaching burden.
We have sought to address this right from the start. For example, the careful design of our Challenge Dashboard simplifies creating, editing and updating challenges, and makes it easy to organize them into the courses to be taught to students.
However, by far the most important dimension of the teaching burden is duplication of effort. At most universities, it is common for the course materials for a particular subject to be recreated continuously time after time by different teachers. The reason this happens is simple. There is no infrastructure in place to allow the sharing of work between teachers.
Globally, this duplication soaks up a large proportion of teaching time and is one of the key reasons higher education teaching is inefficient. If we can remove this unnecessary duplication, we can reduce the global teaching burden and continuously raise quality to improve teaching outcomes.
This is where ChallengeHub is poised to make a huge difference.
We started with the launch of Challenge Universe. Challenge Universe allows teachers to share challenges that they created, and to find and use challenges that have been created by other teachers. This tackles duplication of effort by allowing teachers to compile courses by using existing challenges instead of having to create them from scratch.
We are pleased to follow up on that with an exciting new feature we call ‘Course Universe’. Course Universe supercharges teachers’ ability to share by allowing the sharing of entire courses.
The benefit is obvious — a teacher due to deliver a course can import a similar one shared by another ChallengeHub user, modify it as necessary by adding or removing challenges, and then use it to teach. Preparation that would usually take a few weeks can be achieved in hours.
Importing a course also imports all its challenges, so this is a big improvement in the efficiency gains introduced by Challenge Universe. Teachers were able to share challenges one at a time, but Course Universe speeds this up — in effect challenges can be imported in their tens and potentially in their hundreds.
But sharing a course shares more than just the course’s challenges. The grouping and scheduling of challenges is also shared, i.e., the entire active learning strategy for teaching the course is shared. We’re effectively enabling teachers to share their course planning! We have high hopes that this feature will make a significant dent in the teaching burden, and spur the growth of active learning as the baseline for education.
As ChallengeHub grows, getting courses ready for teaching will become easier and easier. If you know any teachers, please tell them about us today! They can get an account now, make a course, share it, and join the growing movement of teachers making high-quality education material available to everyone.
Tim Emiola is a seasoned technology leader and full-stack software engineer that likes to take on new challenges.
He is a Xoogler and a founder @ChallengeHub.