Focus on new features for The Archive for Education

Education is constantly evolving, for example with more laptops in the classroom as part of the Digisprong initiative – a Flemish Government ICT strategy to provide high-quality digital education – along with blended learning, the use of audiovisual content in lessons, and more. We’re contributing to this development with The Archive for Education, for example with the student area, which we launched in September 2020. Teachers can currently only share watching and listening assignments in this student area, but new learning outcomes involve focusing on improving students’ digital searching skills and digital creation, which calls for further development. So we started investigating: how can we optimise the integration of our search and build features?

We started by asking teachers about the use of ICT and audiovisual content in the classroom. The results from this survey showed that there’s a very high likelihood of students using the search function: 76% of teachers responded that they’d like to start using this new feature. We also asked how happy they are with The Archive for Education. And it’s safe to say that the new student area has been welcomed very enthusiastically. Teachers are very impressed with the platform’s user-friendliness and the extensive range of content on offer.

We followed this survey up with practical test exercises in which students searched for images and audio themselves and had a go at building their own collections. These two features allow students to practise their digital and searching skills under the supervision of a teacher in a secure environment using trustworthy sources from our content partners.