Crowdbeamer, an EdTech innovation that does what it promises

At the Aeres University of Applied Sciences (Wageningen, the Netherlands), the presentations that lecturers use during class are made available through the university’s digital learning environment. Even though it’s easy for students to pick up these presentations, there is substantial added value in using crowdbeamer to share information with students during class. With the crowdbeamer app, the students get to see the information on the screen of their laptop or tablet at the very moment their lecturer shares it. In addition, they can add comments on the spot and save a summary of their lecturer’s explanations with the screenshots of the slides.

A forward-looking, innovative university.

The Aeres University of Applied Sciences Wageningen is a small-scale knowledge institution offering courses that focus on sustainable learning and development for vocational education and businesses. Counting more than 750 students, half of whom are full-time students, the university’s unique strength is its educational concept combining university lectures and workspace learning.

Aeres Wageningen provides Bachelor courses in both full-time and part-time arrangements. Students are trained to become teachers for pre-vocational and secondary vocational education, specialized in the transfer of skills and knowledge in the field of agriculture (agribusiness), horticulture (floral design and retail, landscaping and gardening), food technology, animal breeding and keeping, and consumptive technology (cooking, catering & hospitality).

In addition, Aeres Wageningen provides Associate Degree courses as well as a Professional Master course “Learning and Innovation” (an absolute winner among the Master programs in the field of educational innovation and management). This course is mainly oriented towards educational development and leadership, teaching students how to approach and manage innovation processes in education and learning processes in companies.

Always on the watch for EdTech innovations like crowdbeamer.

“At Aeres Wageningen, we have a strong focus on educational innovation,” according to one Aeres lecturer, “and we are very open to trying out new things so that we see how they work and understand what value they bring to lecturers and students. That’s why I used crowdbeamer with my students. I wanted to give them the opportunity to watch my presentation directly on the screen of their laptop or tablet, and let them discover all crowdbeamer functionalities: taking screenshots of the presentation I share with them, adding their notes to these screenshots and highlighting presentation headlines.

Using crowdbeamer is absolutely great. Connecting my presentation laptop to crowdbeamer is straightforward, while my students can download the app, connect to the crowdbeamer WiFi network and watch my presentation on their screen without any hassle. That’s great!”

Students get started with crowdbeamer in no time.

“Using crowdbeamer fits my way of teaching extremely well” this Aeres lecturer continues, “and that is something that I like a lot. There is quite some change involved for my students though, but they point out that it is nice to work with crowdbeamer while I am explaining a topic. They effectively use the crowdbeamer app, for example, to complete the screenshots of my slides with notes that summarize my explanations.

During classes that combine lectures with student assignments, it would even be better if students could simply switch between taking notes in the crowdbeamer app and searching information on the internet or in our digital learning environment. Crowdbeamer currently shares content through its private WiFi network. I think it’s great that the crowdbeamer team understands the need for this extended functionality, and is working already on an update that will offer internet access to anybody using the app.

Crowdbeamer offers significant added value because it does what it takes to share information during class in an easy way. Since it is so straightforward to connect to crowdbeamer, students get started in no time. And to be honest: I haven’t got many comments from my students related to the use of crowdbeamer. I find that quite revealing because it implies that crowdbeamer is a user-friendly solution. It should therefore be no surprise that students start using the crowdbeamer app right away, exploit all its possibilities and continue to do so during class.”