Elaastic Platform
Head : Franck SILVESTRE
The first version of the Elaastic platform, initially called Tsaap-Notes, was designed, implemented and used as of 2013 in the context of Franck Silvestre’s PhD thesis carried out within the SIERA team, supervised by Philippe Vidal and Julien Broisin and defended in November 2015. Elaastic is an interactive system dedicated to the orchestration of formative evaluation sequences during face-to-face or distance learning courses. Our research work focuses on the design of technological systems to improve the implementation of such pedagogical sequences in the context of mass education.
Elaastic is at the heart of our experiments: we make design hypotheses to improve the quality of the sequences, we implement within the platform the adhoc functionalities, and we test the validity or non validity of our hypotheses in an ecological system, with “real” teachers and “real” students who are the main users of the platform.
Positioning of the platform in relation to existing platforms (local and national)
Elaastic belongs to a family of online platforms that allow one to question an audience in the context of courses or conferences. Among these numerous platforms we can mention Kahout, Plickers, Clickers, Juxtapeer, etc. The vast majority of these platforms come from commercial companies (closed datasets). The platform with a similar positioning to Elaastic is MyDalite. MyDalite is the result of a Canadian research project with objectives similar to those of Elaastic: to provide a platform for a community of practitioners to implement formative evaluations and to contribute to the building of new knowledge in the field.
Technical and organisational description, utilisation rate
Technical description – Elaastic is a web application compliant with the Java EE environment. The application is therefore deployed in a Java EE container (Tomcat) and communicates with a MySQL database. It is currently hosted on an IRIT virtual machine. The interface of the application is responsive, allowing use from any device with a web client (computer, tablet, smartphone).
Organisational description – The Technology-Enhanced Learning research group composed of members of the SIERA team is a stakeholder of Elaastic as the designer/developer of the platform and as the main producer of the knowledge resulting from it.
The platform is mainly developed by Franck Silvestre assisted over short periods by a research engineer funded on a project basis or by doctoral or master students in the context of tutored projects or internships also funded on projects. The developments are divided into two main areas: one directly related to research (development of functionalities to test hypotheses) and one related to the industrialisation of the platform.
Uses – Since 2013, the platform has been used by more than 50 teachers, with almost 3200 separate students providing more than 12100 textual responses in the context of the activities orchestrated by Elaastic. The teachers are mainly from higher education. The use of the platform in various pedagogical initiative projects (on interactive teaching at UT3, via the Toulouse INP Pedagogical Innovation Bonus) has enabled the platform to be disseminated in higher education establishments in Toulouse (mainly UT3 and engineering schools).
The B4MATIVE! project started in 2019, funded by the french government and conducted in partnership with the Nancy-Metz Academy, has made it possible (1) to actively pursue research work based on Elaastic thanks to the recruitment of a doctoral student (2) to provide access to a significant number of users, representing an exceptional ecological context for the continuation of the work. Elaastic is available to teachers and students from more than 82 of the academy’s high schools.
Some scientific papers related to the Elaastic platform
- Jean-François Parmentier, Franck Silvestre. La (dé-)synchronisation des transitions dans un processus d’évaluation formative exécuté à distance : impact sur l’engagement des étudiants. 9ème Conférence sur les Environnements Informatiques pour l’Apprentissage Humain – EIAH 2019, ATIEF : Association des Technologies de l’Information pour l’ Education et la Formation, Jun 2019, Paris, France.
Access : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02904155 - Silvestre, Franck and Vidal, Philippe and Broisin, Julien Reflexive learning, socio-cognitive conflict and peer-assessment to improve the quality of feedbacks in online tests. (2015) In: 10th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2015), 15 September 2015 – 18 September 2015 (Toledo, Spain).
Access : https://oatao.univ-toulouse.fr/15337/