Technologies continue to present educators with new means of interaction with their students, and COVID-19 has highlighted the imperative for these. Co-created Interactive Courseware (CIC) is a new academic platform under development which is intended to enable students’ close interaction with course material, potentially making courses more co-operative and dynamic, and their content co-constructed. Staff at four European Universities are working on this Erasmus+ project to explore these technologies in a range of pedagogical settings.

The Co-created Interactive Courseware facilitates interaction between students, their teacher and key texts in blended activities and conversations either face-to-face or remotely. Rather than the text remaining static on a page, the recorded annotations and memos create an asynchronous dialogue that emancipates users from being anchored to the printed page and the classroom.
We aim to discuss how this platform combines a social learning environment where students can help each other and track their progress, with a space to create interactive, co-creation-enabled textbooks with no technical overhead; one that incorporates a learning analytics engine offering lecturers insights into the learning trajectory of their students.
This will be a critically reflective account of progress on the development of the project so far, interrupted as it has been by the pandemic, and will include a section on how we see this contributing to online, blended and hybrid approaches to higher education.
This session will discuss the affordances we envisage this approach offers (collaboration, creativity, self-directed learning, personalised resources – see, e.g. Schuh, 2004; Sawyer, 2007; Singh, 2009) with the theoretical underpinnings we are drawing on (dialogic practice, heutagogy, student empowerment, nurturing agency in students – Hase & Kenyon, 2001; Gorsky et al., 2010) and demonstrate some hypothetical uses, including primary and post-compulsory teacher education and engineering.

We also seek feedback from audience members on their perceptions of whether and how this could be effectively implemented in their contexts/subjects as part of our research-based design to maximise its potential.