Crafting Excellence: Content Sprint with e-teaching.org for their 20th Anniversary

Last week, Book Sprints joined e-teaching.org at the beautiful Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien campus to conduct a one-of-a-kind Sprint in celebration of their 20th anniversary. In what was dubbed as a “Content Sprint,” Book Sprints facilitator Barbara Ruehling joined six assessment experts from different universities and three in-house editors to update several topic pages on assessments within the massive repository of knowledge that is the e-teaching portal.  

Why a Content Sprint?

The e-teaching.org platform is unique from other organizations we’ve worked with in that their outputs do not normally consist of books. Instead, their outputs are in the form of articles and topic pages on various areas of digital media and education. Over the past 20 years, experts from various fields have come together to contribute to e-teaching’s platform. Through the platform, experts are able to share their knowledge on recent pedagogical theories, best practices, and practical how-tos for educators everywhere to maximize in their own teaching. 

With this massive repository comes the equally massive responsibility of keeping the information and resources within it up-to-date on the latest in the field of online teaching. This plethora of resources for online educators contains different topics nested within each other, making it challenging to ensure everything is updated with expert knowledge. An incredible in-house editorial team consistently rises to meet this challenge, ensuring both quality and accuracy of the work to the best of their ability. 

For their 20th Anniversary, e-teaching.org wanted to respond to this challenge in a big way through a series of Sprints carefully designed to help experts update large sections of the platform in less than five days. And so the Content Sprint was born! 

Participants of the Content Sprint discuss as they write about various e-learning topics under the Assessment umbrella.

What is a Content Sprint?

This adaptation of the Book Sprints method allowed us to gather our experts together for three and a half days to finish the update for the Assessments topic area on the e-teaching platform. 

Drawing from the principles and techniques of the original Book Sprint method, experts were guided through the creation of new material on Assessments, such as with regards to new developments like the impact of artificial intelligence on universities. The in-house editors who joined the Sprint were also helpful in linking the experts’ work back to the bigger picture of the entire repository. They did this by identifying linkages to pre-existing content that could be updated or related content that could be relevant to the specific topic. 

Despite the risky experimental method, participants of the Sprint were satisfied with the successful outcome of the Sprint. Barbara shared that participants found the process to be more constructive than their usual methods, giving them the opportunity to flex their creative muscles and innovate their ways of working. 

Experimenting with Sprints

Book Sprints and e-teaching.org have a history with experimenting with the Book Sprint method and how its versatility can be maximized. Last year, we joined them for a “Strategy Sprint” to understand how we can help them tackle the large update they had planned for their 20th Anniversary. This was followed by a “mini-Sprint” wherein two experts came in to test the strategy. And now, a year later, we’re happy to have put the strategy to use successfully! 

Head on over to e-teaching.org to learn more about their fantastic platform. Keep an eye out for more Sprint updates in the future! Never miss an update with us by following us at the links below. 

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