Throughout their time with the CDT, our students work on our Meta-MOOC.

A lot of useful SLT learning material is available on the internet in the form of Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. The SLT Meta-MOOC is a resource to learn about both general and highly specialised topics in SLT, created by you and your fellow students under the supervision of experts. 

This is modelled on two aspects: 

• First is the ISCA SCOOT resource, in which Sheffield plays a leading role. 

• Secondly, it is modelled on the technical blogs on specific subjects, which are now becoming common in machine learning, vision and speech and language. 

Students work in small groups of 2 or 3 (a ‘work group’) to collate, evaluate and organise on-line training resources for given SLT-related topics, with specific focus on lectures and multimedia content, online tutorials and examples. It is important to go beyond simply collecting material, students should add binding explanations and categorise and specify the strength of the content or provide pointers into components thereof. The student working groups will present their work and then transfer to another topic.

Material is made available internally and, following quality assurance, released for public access. The theme leads and a module lead will support the selection of topics, balance and quality.

The CDT’s Meta-MOOC is hosted on a custom server using Atlassian Confluence. This allows really nice content to be created collaboratively, published once checked and allow commenting from the community.