Team name: Learnflix & Chill
Team members: Carolin Straßmann, Andreas Lingnau, André Helgert, Sebastian Brüne, Adriano Nicolosi, Malin Benjes, Alicia Neumann, Anna Westenfelder Gil
Challenge: 2020 brought the unimaginable: a university with empty classrooms. Let's hack the digital winter semester together to identify a way forward for higher education institutions in uncertain times.
Challenge host: Hochschulforum Digitalisierung + DAAD + AI Campus, Berlin, Germany
Challenge theme: Challenging the Foundations of Education

Solution description: 
Social isolation is a factor, which may lead to decreased learning efficiency in online- and on-campus-situations as well as to low students’ satisfaction with their study-experience (Erichsen & Bollinger, 2011). Research shows that, especially in online settings, better communication between students brings increased sense of belonging and greater satisfaction (Bernholt et al., 2018).

Learnflix offers students the opportunity to watch learning videos or lectures together, in a large group of 80 people or in a private room with a small learning group. The system allows students to join a video room of their choice and watch a lesson together with their peers. One can express their mood via a button or flag important segments for later. In addition, there is the option to exchange information about the content of the video with everyone else in the chat. With a picture-in-picture view, the chat can be incorporated into the video in order to allow the viewer to follow the chat conversation without losing focus on the video.

Once a learning unit ends, the video will automatically be stored together with the corresponding chat and will be either visible to the public or only to the participants of the session, depending on the configuration of the video room. The system allows also revisiting the room flags with a timeline where each chat message will be marked with a timestamp, which allows users to jump to the corresponding position in the video. Thereby no information or question is lost.

As students, we know that during a fully online semester as the one we were forced to have during the COVID-19 outbreak, it is particularly hard for students to stay engaged and motivated. It often helps to work together in groups. With Learnflix, online learning will feel like studying on campus as the system allows following an online lecture while interacting with our fellow students.

Read the full description of the solution here