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OnCreate
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Aug 31, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Study programmes following blended-learning or even pure online approaches are becoming increasingly popular in higher education. Two main drivers for this development are increasing international cooperations among universities and with industry partners and the special requirements of students in continuing education programmes. But even regular courses use online platforms to establish a permanent point of exchange beyond the weekly course meetings. Yet in a time, where the use of eLearning platforms, Google Drive and Skype feels commonplace, the abundance of available tools conceals the scarcity of processual knowledge to use them, especially compared to the richness of methods we use to apply in physical teaching and collaboration. OnCreate proposal is about the exchange, implementation and evaluation of processual and contextual knowledge of online collaborative courses with focus on creation and innovation. By the term “Creative Online Collaboration Processes” we refer to all such activities which aim to solve in a group problems that do not have standard solutions, mediated through web-based tools. Typically, such problems require interdisciplinary, lateral thinking, social empathy and extensive ideation with the aim of mutual inspiration. The processes applied are often nonlinear and rely on multimodal means of synchronous and asynchronous communication, with a special focus on visual tools. The highly interdisciplinary “Design Thinking”-process as defined by Stanford University’s d.school will serve as a common design process reference throughout the project. The project is divided in three main phases. The partners will spend the first six months to compile best practises from both within and outside the consortium, to agree on a common course schedule for the following project phase and to define initial approaches for prospective evaluation of courses. The second phase will last about two years, implementing, evaluating and improving online collaborative courses in at least four iterations. In the final six months of the project, the courses will continue, but the project resources will be concentrated mainly on documentation and dissemination activities. As its main output, the OnCreate project will provide comprehensive guidelines and tutorials on how to integrate creative online collaboration into existing and new university courses, categorized by subjects and phases in the design process. Apart from questions of choice of tools and platforms, the project will especially investigate on how to create the social and other “soft” contextual factors that foster creative collaboration in online learning spaces.
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