The Vietsch Foundation made a new contribution to the NLnet Research and Higher Education Technology Fund to support two innovative projects:

• Explain.directly.  This collaborative project between the Web Information Systems group of TU Delft and FeedbackFruits, aims at piloting new and more effective access paradigms for Online Open Courseware. In most cases, online educational material is intended to be consumed in a traditional course-based manner. The project will work on making access to educational material easier, targeted and direct, re-usable and more tailored to life-long learning scenarios.
• Democratic Sendcomm. The project aims to build a user-friendly connected telemetry appliance with just enough configuration to teach democratic communication while keeping the learning curve flat. The main deliverable will be a Opensource design of cheap yet high performance LoRa devices in form factors appropriate for one low-power platform (like BBC Micro:bit) and one high-power platform (like Minnowboard Turbot). Work will include a sample production run of 1000 units for one of the form factors and suitable documentation for educational purposes.