Background: Built on the premise that people often learn best by doing, Classmate was built to enable teachers of evidence synthesis to use the tasks available on Cochrane Crowd in their teaching environments. Classmate now offers trainers and teachers a range of tasks and learning activities that relate to producing and understanding high quality health evidence. The process is simple: a teacher logs into Classmate and selects the task or tasks they want their students to do. They set the timeframe in which the task is to be done and then invite their students to the task. They can put their students into groups or teams, and they can monitor their students’ progress in the task. Classmate enables teachers to enhance or supplement their teaching; it provides students with the opportunity to contribute to real and needed tasks; and it helps Cochrane keep up to date with the ever-increasing amounts of primary research being produced.
Objectives: Workshop participants will be introduced to the latest version of Classmate. This will include understanding what the platform does and how it works, as well as an introduction to the microtasking and microlearning concepts that are fundamental to both Classmate and Cochrane Crowd. Participants will also have the opportunity to set up and take part in a Classmate learning activity (and win some prizes!).
Description: The workshop will begin with a series of short presentations introducing both Cochrane Crowd and Classmate. These presentations will cover what each platform does and the range of possible tasks available from study design identification tasks to PICO (population, intervention, comparison, outcome) extraction tasks. For the remaining time, the workshop will be highly interactive. In teams, participants will be put into teams and join a live task, which we will set up together in the workshop using Classmate (crowd.cochrane.org/classmate). The workshop is open to all but likely to be especially appealing to consumers, trainers, teachers, and students.