"Digital classroom" facilitates home schooling

"JenaVsVirus" community continues to develop app for teaching staff and school classes

With the easing of coronavirus restrictions in recent weeks, most pupils in Jena have slowly returned to regular school life - mostly in an alternating model of face-to-face teaching and homeschooling. The latter remains a major challenge for children and young people, but also for parents and teaching staff. A non-representative survey conducted by the city's education department, the Jena Economic Development Agency (JenaWirtschaft) and witelo e.V. - scientific and technical places of learning - revealed that parents would particularly like to see active monitoring of the tasks set and regular communication between teachers and pupils.

This gap could be closed by a Germany-wide project team that took part in the "JenaVsVirus" online camp in April. The idea to develop the open source app klasse.cloud was born at the German government's #WirVsVirus hackathon and was subsequently developed further at the Jena counterpart.

Our aim is to make digital education simple and accessible in order to enable the exchange of teaching materials between teachers and students,

says Lukas Boschke, project coordinator of klasse.cloud.All that is required is a smartphone and mobile internet - particularly helpful for those families who do not have a laptop, printer or fast internet connection. According to the app makers, Klasse.cloud is intended to enable pupils to obtain and work on their learning materials independently and at the same time support parents and teaching staff in the jungle of homeschooling tools. The most important thing, however, according to the app developers: The data is optimized and compressed and therefore requires less capacity - so it can also be used with a prepaid tariff with a low data volume. Data security also plays an important role:

Thanks to anonymization using a QR code during registration and the use of a virtual private network - a so-called VPN access - the data of all users is secure,

says Lukas Boschke.

The start page of the app provides an introduction to all school subjects. Teaching staff upload tasks to the app and pupils can then answer them online or by photo and send them for correction,

Boschke explains the idea behind the smartphone app. Any queries can be clarified via class chat or a video call to the teaching staff.

klasse.cloud continues to grow

The project team now comprises 35 participants who, in addition to conceptualizing, developing software and designing the user interface, are also responsible for preparing used smartphones. The aim is to give every pupil barrier-free access to the digital offering.

In Jena, things are now getting very concrete: following the #JenaVsVirusCamp, four students from the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at Friedrich Schiller University Jena have agreed to further develop the klasse.cloud app as a practical project in the summer semester.

The application has now attracted attention across Europe via the #EUvsVirus hackathon. Lukas Boschke reports that Germany is not the only country looking for low-threshold applications for homeschooling:

Education should cost nothing and offer everyone the same chances and opportunities. That's why we want to make homeschooling available to all children in all parts of the world with a wide range of devices and conditions.

The team is currently looking for volunteer UI/graphic designers and UX designers who would like to make their knowledge available for a charitable purpose in line with the principle of social entrepreneurship in order to give as many pupils as possible access to digital forms of learning.

An overview of all projects can be found at #JenaVsVirus.