Speakers
Mr
Hans V. Lerum
(University of Oslo, Norway)Mr
Henrik Norén
(University of Oslo, Norway)
Description
Many institutions across Europe (and elsewhere) teach radiochemistry, more or less with the same content. At most institutions, the teaching material has been created and developed in-house through many years and frequently through many generations of teachers. In most cases, the material is not publicly available. However, from time to time institutions have to create new courses or at least update existing ones, which can be a large and time-consuming undertaking. For radiochemistry teaching, which in many places is only taught to small groups of students, justifying the personnel and other costs of developing teaching material and methods can be prohibitively difficult, and will frequently be done by idealistic individuals on their own time.
As part of the CINCH project [1] for developing teaching and training in Radiochemistry in Europe, we have therefore developed an open platform for sharing teaching material and even active collaboration across institute/university borders. The platform is run on a wiki engine and is called NukWik [2]. The best known example of a wiki is Wikipedia [3].
In brief, a wiki can be described as an editable web site. To edit a wiki there is no need to know complicated computer code or similar (e.g. HTML), in most cases it is done in a simple and easy to understand web-page interface. Content can be added or edited by any member of the wiki user-group provided an internet connection is available. Content is coordinated by links between the pages in addition to different categories. Categorising the wiki-pages is very important, as this is one of the most common ways to seek out relevant information. Furthermore, each wiki-page has an associated discussions page. This can be used by teachers to discuss how to improve and use the material, e.g. a specific laboratory exercise.
With NukWik, teachers can share and collaborate on anything from a given calculation exercise to complete courses, including extensive laboratory exercises. Institutions will of course still "own" their own courses and students, but teaching material and experience can be shared. In this way one can make better courses with updated and relevant content without single-handedly taking the full burden of time and resource costs.
Of course, NukWik only works if those using it are willing to freely share their material and experience. If you are such a person, please do not hesitate to log on and/or contact us!
References:
[1] CINCH is a 7th Framework Program of the European Commission (Euratom), project web-page is located at http://cinch-project.eu/index.php
[2] https://wiki.uio.no/mn/safe/nukwik/index.php/NukWik
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Primary authors
Mr
Hans V. Lerum
(University of Oslo, Norway)
Mr
Henrik Norén
(University of Oslo, Norway)
Co-authors
Prof.
Jan John
(Czech Technical University)
Prof.
Jon Petter Omtvedt
(University of Oslo)
collaboration CHINC
(FP7 EuroAtom project)
