The winner of the recent Think Data-Driven Education: The ASN™ Open Data Challenge has been selected. Salman Ahmad Syed, a student at the University of Waterloo has been awarded an HP EliteBook Notebook for his winning app, TeachSphere.

TeachSphere addresses a real need in education: to enable teachers to share professional insights and best practices regarding the curriculum. Salman’s app gives teachers a way of rating how challenging it was to help students achieve specific expectations in the Ontario curriculum. More importantly, TeachSphere gives teachers the opportunity to comment on why an element was difficult — and share best practices on how they helped their students succeed.

Adding this social dimension to the curriculum also offers the potential to create a new, useful layer of data: identifying elements of the curriculum that teachers may find tough to teach. This new social data could be incredibly useful for government ministries or boards of education as they think about where to apply resources to achieve better student outcomes.

You can learn more about the winning app through Salman’s YouTube presentation.

TeachSphere is a demonstration of the amazing things developers can do with data from the Achievement Standards NetworkTM (ASN), a site operated by D2L that is dedicated to the storage and maintenance of machine-readable curriculum standards for Ontario and many other jurisdictions around the world. And, with support from ODX , D2L continues to add more provincial curriculum data to ASN.

Congratulations to Salman for a well thought out app, one that has the potential to turn machine-readable curriculum standards into a useful tool for educators!

If you have any questions about the contest or about ASN’s machine-readable curriculum data, contact educhallenge@codx.ca.

ABOUT ODX

Canada's Open Data Exchange (ODX) is a private-public partnership. Its mandate is to make it simple to access and use any open data for commercial purposes. ODX connects those who need data with those who have data. It develops tools to share data, facilitates a partner network to accelerate commercialization, and leads a national initiative to strengthen Canada's technology brand. ODX is turning open data into real wealth. Learn more at codx.ca.

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D2L is the software leader that makes the learning experience better. The company's cloud-based platform -- Brightspace -- is not a common one-size-fits-all learning management system (LMS). It's easier to use, more flexible, and smart. With Brightspace, you can personalize the experience for every learner to deliver real results. The company is a world leader in learning analytics: its platform predicts learner performance so that you can take action in real-time to keep them on track. Brightspace is used by learners in higher education, K-12, and the enterprise sector, including the Fortune 1000. D2L has operations in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Brazil, and Singapore. www.D2L.com

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