Join CALRG for our second Open Societal Challenges special! Find out more about some of the challenges currently involving IET colleagues. Our presenters for this session are Tim Coughlan on Exploring the design and development of a digital access advisor to discuss disabilities, barriers and solutions and Christothea Herodotou and Jessica Carr on Citizen science across the OU: Insights from five workshops with OU stakeholders.
All welcome!
Exploring the design and development of a digital access advisor to discuss disabilities, barriers and solutions (Tim Coughlan)
In its first year, work on this Open Societal Challenge has explored how to create a virtual advisor that can discuss disabilities and barriers faced, and provide personalised guidance and support. Project activities have included participatory workshops guided by a range of scenarios, exploration of the design space, exploring ways to create and utilise a knowledge base of disability descriptions and related solutions, and the development of an initial experimental prototype. This talk will identify some of the key opportunities and challenges of using artificial intelligence to make innovations that can empower students and enhance the support they receive.
Citizen science across the OU: Insights from five workshops with OU stakeholders (Christothea Herodotou & Jessica Carr)
In this presentation, we will report on a collaborative project between STEM and IET, originally submitted as an OSC proposal yet funded by Research England. As part of the project, we delivered five online and ftf workshops to OU staff about citizen science (CS) with the aim to: a) document CS projects and activities that take place across the University, b) identify how technological advancements can enhance the design and implementation of CS projects in the future by gathering technical and other requirements supporting citizen science tasks, c) disseminate the use of nQuire and Zooniverse as platforms that can support OSC project delivery and implementation, and d) identify how the OU could enable and amplify collaborations with non-academic organisations for the co-design and implementation of CS projects. We will report on findings across these dimensions as well as a follow-up collaborative proposal we submitted to OSC following insights from the workshops.