ERASMUS-EDU-2023-PI-FORWARD
Project number: 101132432

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The platform

TIM (The Interactive Material)

General-purpose learning management platform for producing highly interactive and open digital learning materials.

  • Purpose of the platform: The platform aims to facilitate the organization of online or hybrid coding camps by recommending specific tools to support the entire software development process, with a focus on team collaboration. Additionally, it offers assessment-related features to help evaluate the outcome of the coding camp. To this end, the platform will be accompanied by a dedicated handbook containing recommendations and implementation guidelines. The platform will prioritize inclusiveness, usability, and multilingualism as its distinctive features.
  • Users: Participants, Facilitators, Coordinators, Peer-tutors, OSCAR team members

TIM (The Interactive Material) is a general-purpose learning management platform for producing highly interactive and open digital learning materials. The platform is tailored to teachers, students, material developers, and other content creators alike as an all- encompassing, centralized platform for creating and hosting document-based materials. TIM is not only a learning management system, but a more generic document creation platform. The software is open source (MIT-license) and actively maintained by the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Jyväskylä (see https://github.com/TIM-JYU/TIM). 

Details

The platform is also provided as a SaaS product, hosted by the university of Jyväskylä. In the context of this project, University of Jyväskylä will maintain and develop TIM for all the partners at https://oscar.tim.education/. Moreover, the hosted TIM service is free to use for all users, excluding large organizations that need more server capacity for the software to run. A recently published MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) on quantum computing provides an example of what the course material and interactive exercises can be (see https://tim.jyu.fi/view/kurssit/tie/kvanttiaakkoset/2024/a/koti/en-US)

Interactive platform

The platform is interactive by its design. As the acronym TIM stands for The Interactive Material, the overarching idea is to help users produce interactive content for several types of courses or sessions considering different subjects and topics. The core aspect of the platform is the document-based design. All pages are documents that consist of text and reusable interactive blocks. 

With user-programmable templates and custom styles, it is possible to create course areas, books, questionnaires, exams, discussion areas, live support pages and personalized learning analytics dashboards. By letting interactive documents be embedded in other documents, TIM removes the need to jump from one system to another, reducing the cognitive load on students and teachers. All the modifications and additions in the TIM documents are made with built-in document editor.  

Core features
  • The platform supports various devices and browsers.
  • It enables the user to build interactive learning materials.
  • Materials can be accessed according to the current role of the user.
  • Exams and entrance exams can be arranged on the platform.
  • Learning analytics is provided to monitor student performance.
  • There is a chat platform for lectures.
  • Enrolling functionality for mentoring and group meetings.
  • The platform supports writing math with TeX.
Future Enhancement Possibilities and Ideas

Since TIM is a free and open-source platform, there is a good chance to affect its development. New features implemented in the OSCAR project will be actively communicated to ensure the dissemination of the results. 

In addition to OSCAR, there are already several propositions of features to be developed into TIM. Much of the ongoing development (independent of this project) is related to usability and a user interface. In addition, there are user stories related to course flow or exercise implementation. Overall, TIM is a capable platform for teachers and students, and it still is evolving in time to be even more capable for the future use cases.

MAIN FEATURES

OVERVIEW OF THE FEATURES:

User-programmable templates and custom styles
Possibility to create course areas, books, questionnaires, exams, discussion areas
Document - based design
Chat platform
Interactive materials

OSCAR

ERASMUS-EDU-2023-PI-FORWARD Project number: 101132432

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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