School of
Management and Law
Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
Winterthur, June 16, 2014
Dear Colleague,
In the framework of our EU FP7 Era.NET RUS project SoMeCat we are developing a social media toolkit. The toolkit aims at supporting instructors in Higher Education to utilize social media for their teaching. Specifically it asks four questions to analyse the instructors teaching scenario and, based on an algorithm, suggests the best matching social media class. For each of the social media classes instructional tips are provided.
We are now in the project phase where we want to acquire further expert-/user feedback in order to validate and improve the toolkit. Today we are asking for your help in that step. We would kindly ask you to test the toolkit and provide feedback in the form which will establish the basis for our improvement process. We integrated a feedback form in the toolkit – you can access it on the result page of the query wizard (for conveniences please find the questions that will be asked on the following page).
We would suggest that you proceed in the following steps:
• Visit the toolkit via this URL. It is absolutely necessary to use this URL as we gather data from different regions (at the moment Turkish speaking, German speaking and Russian speaking). The URL ensures that the data provided will be stored in the right place. Please also note: Cookies must be enabled.
• Please start by clicking around on the main page and check how suitable everything is.
• Then please think about a couple of scenarios where you would like to utilize social media in your teaching. Please start the query wizard with a such a scenario in mind. This will allow you to assess if the social media class that will be suggested as a result of your answers is reasonable or not. As this is the core function of the toolkit (to suggest the best fitting social media class to an instructional setting analyzed via the four questions and based on an algorithm), we highly appreciate your feedback on that (the window for giving feedback will be accessible on the results page of the query wizard). We would be happy if you could repeat the process with 2-3 scenarios.
• In the query wizard further information can be displayed and on the result page instructional tips for each social media class are provided. We would appreciate your feedback on suitability, quality of the content provided.
Christian Rapp, MA (Essex)
Project development and management St.-Georgen-Platz 2
Postfach
CH-8401 Winterthur Tel. +41 58 934 66 56 Fax +41 58 935 66 56 rapp@zhaw.ch Website
www.zid.zhaw.ch
School of
Management and Law
Center for Education and New Learning
2
• We would very much appreciate if you could give your feedback in English so all project partners can read it. If you find that you cannot express certain aspects as precisely as you wish in English please feel free to provide them in German.
As coordinator and on behalf on the whole project teams, I would like to thank you in advance for your contribution to improve the toolkit. We will publish the results of data collecting/ improvement and inform you about it.
Best regards, Christian Rapp
