OOEP

The OOEP project board exists to help you find things you might like to work on. Don't take the desired skills too literally: we certainly aren't asking for people with all of them at once.

Cocreate

Online collaboration, often restricted to text or voice chat, does not make it easy to use the complex symbols that are the lifeblood of many scientific disciplines. Cocreate, an open-source, ad-hoc interactive whiteboard system, makes this much easier. While interactive whiteboards do exist already, many of them are tied to specific video-call systems, some require creating user accounts, and few are self-hostable and open source. Cocreate, on the other hand, makes cooperative whiteboarding as simple as going to the server, getting a link, and sharing that ilnk with your collaborators.

Desired skills:

Graphic and UI/UX Design

Python and JavaScript/CoffeeScript Coding

Scaling Large Web Apps

Comingle

Standard online meeting solutions allow users to share their screens one or two at a time, but cannot replicate the collaboration opportunities offered by all clustering around one table, working with the same equipment. Comingle integrates web tools, ranging from whiteboards to Wikipedia pages, into a shared virtual room. It's a web browser in the same way that Google Docs is a word processor. Comingle is the culmination of Professor Demaine's co-stack.

Desired skills:

Graphic and UI/UX Design

Python and JavaScript/CoffeeScript Coding

Scaling Large Web Apps

Coauthor

Mathematicians have a hard time texting each other. Quite beyond the inability of a 26-letter alphabet to succinctly express most mathematical ideas, they struggle with the fact that online fora, email chains, and the like are set up to provide a single timeline, an authoritative history of a conversation, with each contribution irrevocably associated with its author. This is not a good model for the free ebb and flow of ideas which characterize mathematical collaboration. Coauthor is a message board with a difference. Posts can be edited, reordered, and even reparented as the discussion requires, all in an environment which supports Markdown and LaTeX. This allows for a new kind of remote work, one in which the egos of the academics are secondary to the project itself. The software is self-hosted and not hard to set up, and has been used in at least one MOOC.

Desired skills:

Technical and end-user support

Circle Z

With classes being moved online, students are missing their collaborative learning communities more than ever. Circle Z provides chat rooms with TeX integrated with Mumble for low-latency audio, shared whiteboards, collaborative real-time TeX editors, pre-recorded lecture video and live streaming viewers, a client-side TeX environment and DVI viewer. Inside each chat room, you may import PDFs into the whiteboard, and may write there if you have a touchscreen or tablet. There is also a grading queue for managing homework submissions. Circle Z helps recreate the collaborative learning environment, especially in math and sciences. Circle Z is currently the platform used for Ross Mathematics Program online.

Desired skills:

Front-end web development

Many other things -- get in touch!

Lectr

Online materials need to be accessible and easy to navigate in an online world. Things such as lecture notes, presentations, lecture video, homework sets and solutions should be easy to access for all students to ensure students have the easiest learning experience and that they are most encouraged to seek out course resources. This project attempts to best perform this function, by creating an online resource that allows for such features like: synchronized lecture notes with video, well-placed links with problems and solutions, etc. We are currently developing a GUI which allows instructors to create course pages with synchronized lecture notes with video in a form similar to this.

Desired skills:

Graphic and UI/UX Design

Python and JavaScript/CoffeeScript Coding

Scaling Large Web Apps

NemoBot

Teaching with peer instruction often relies on the use of clickers -– a kind of audience response system -- to query students in classes and actively encourage peer discussions. Typically, students are asked to vote individually on a question before they get to see a whole-class response illustrated statistically (e.g., histogram or pie-charts), and to engage in peer discussions. This is followed by a low-stakes quiz of the same nature as the poll question. Peer instruction using this poll-quiz routine therefore can be a good way to check-in with the students, and give teachers the feedback to avoid experts' blind spots. We are developing a smart audience response system in mobile AI chatbot software and the pedagogy to bridge the online teaching gap between students and teachers.

Desired skills:

Web app development

Scaling large web apps

Connections to or understanding of research communities in academia

ResearchSeminars.org

ResearchSeminars.org is a crowd-sourced platform where researchers can share links to their seminars. The switch towards remote academics has extended the reach of research seminars, which were often only accessible to those who could attend in person. This provides a wealth of opportunities for sharing the latest research to people anywhere. Researchseminars.org provides an ongoing, updated list of virtually accessible research seminars, conferences, as well as allowing for the posting of related material. At the moment, researchseminars.org mostly contains mathematics seminars, however, we aim to cover a wide range of fields and topics.

Desired skills:

Experience in web or Python design

Connections to or understanding of research communities in academia