Cochrane Classmate: a trainer's toolkit to support and enhance evidence production training activities with interactive micro-tasks

Article type
Authors
Noel-Storr A1, Dooley G2
1Oxford University, Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group
2Metaxis Ltd
Abstract
Background:
People often learn best by doing. In response to the frequently asked question, "Can I use Cochrane Crowd for my students?", we developed Cochrane Classmate (https://crowd.cochrane.org/classmate). This tool enables people to use the Crowd tasks for their groups of students. Cochrane Crowd is a platform that offers a range of small, discrete tasks aimed at identifying and describing health research. Many of the tasks are suitable for beginners, and a brief interactive training module accompanies every task. Classmate simply enables trainers or teachers to use the Crowd tasks for their students.

Objectives:
Trainers and teachers will be able to use Cochrane Classmate to create exciting activities for learning about evidence production and synthesis. The tool will allow trainers to create rewarding 'learning by doing' classroom activities using tasks from the Cochrane Crowd platform: http://crowd.cochrane.org.

Description:
The workshop will begin with a short presentation describing the aims and objectives of Cochrane Classmate.

The workshop will then provide participants, working in groups, with the opportunity to create their first Classmate Challenge using the toolkit, involving:

- selecting an appropriate Crowd micro-task;
- deciding on who to invite and what teams to create;
- deciding on the duration of the challenge.

For the final part of the workshop, we will run a live Classmate challenge to further demonstrate how Classmate can be used, and give participants a chance to see Classmate from the student's or learner's perspective.