Edinburgh Team are Finalists for the Global DigiEduHack Award
On 3 October, The University of Edinburgh hosted a DigiEduHack event, where innovators worked together to tackle challenges facing the future of education. Of the 130 innovative solutions submitted by DigiEduHack teams across the globe, Edinburgh team “Eduhackers” had their solution chosen as one of 10 finalists for the Global DigiEduHack Award. Eduhackers team members are Ana Hibert, Elaine Farrow, Alexia Revueltas, and Sarah Austin.
This year’s global DigiEduHack initiative brought together 1700 innovators in 21 countries. DigiEduHack is a hackathon initiative created by Unite Ideas, a global community for individuals, teams and organizations who can collaborate with the United Nations to develop and leverage technology for sustainable development.
The team's solution is InterPortal, an opt-in web portal that will help Early Career Researchers at the University of Edinburgh to make connections with peers with similar research interests. The portal can gather data from interested users (e.g. name, email, etc.) and then run it through internal University of Edinburgh database and external academic databases, gathering public information about research interests, location and contact information. Users can curate their profiles which are stored in the portal, and used to link people with similar research interests.
The solution aims to enhance collaboration within the university as a way to accelerate research and create a network within the Early Career Researchers community, which can be extended beyond the university. The solution is based on University of Edinburgh but it can be easily applied to other communities and universities.
Voting is now getting underway to choose the top three solutions. Each of the top three teams which will receive a grant of €5,000 to develop on the solution’s project, and team members will be declared Digital Education Ambassadors to Europe.