The National School for Public Administration and Local Government (ESDDA) offers a course entitled: “Collaborative Tools in Public Administration”. This course partly focuses on collaborative content production, by the use of wiki tools. Since National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government (EKDDA) participates in the SlideWiki project along with sixteen other partners, Slide Wiki was integrated, in 2017-8, in the curriculum of ESDDA and particularly in the aforementioned course. 120 students from different departments of specialization participated in the project.
Initially, the platform was presented and its purpose and basic functions were explained to the students. The students created a personal account and then had the opportunity, as users, to seek, create or upload their own presentations and attend the open course “Open Government”, produced by EKDDA. The course instructors created new presentations (Decks) and trained authorized workgroups of students. All the members of the working groups followed a certain scenario and created individually set slides (Sub-decks) into the decks, so as to be acquainted with the platform interface and to search for implicit problems that may arise in its use or for bugs and problems of the software.
Some of the results are available on https://slidewiki.org/deck/121261-1/hmerides-toy-tmhmatos-pshfiakhs-politikhs
Finally, the students were asked to fill in an assessment form, making remarks and proposing suggestions for the platform’s further development and improvement.
The results of this assessment stress the positive attitude of the students towards the SlideWiki platform:
- 80% would use it and recommend it to others.
- 90% think the platform’s interface is user friendly and there is no special need for technical support
According to the students, the strong pros of the platform are:
- The collaborative creation of texts / presentations and their sharing among the users – a common feature to all wikis
- The easy editing of the texts / presentations
- The great number of templates
- The possibility to save texts/ presentations in pdf format
- It’s clear and intelligible structure
Features on which further research and investigation is needed, according to the students, are:
- Particular features in deck editing (e.g. automatic format changes)
- Decks delete
- Keyword and free search for the demo decks
- Process and save in real time of sub –decks when groups work in real time together