Wooclap integration into a Horizon Europe Pathfinder Open project: REMAP

Interview with Diego Colombara, lecturer and coordinator of REMAP

Why have you chosen to make use of Wooclap in the framework of your research project?

Our project “REusable MAsk Patterning” (REMAP) is a research and innovation project, so it is not immediately apparent why we have adopted the use of Wooclap. Besides coordinating REMAP, I am Associate Professor at the University of Genova (UniGe), where I teach courses, and have first come across this tool. Wooclap is very powerful and easy to use. I use it extensively during my lectures to probe how students are coping with my pace and identify if any of the subject matter is unclear and needs to be explained differently. It is based on this positive experience that I suggested to embed Wooclap in our project.

Which functionality of Wooclap you find useful for REMAP’s purposes?

So far, we have been using Wooclap for two different purposes, hence we exploit different functionalities. On the one hand, we use it during our project meetings, on the other, we have just explored using it during our outreach campaigns in participant-pace mode.

Can you tell us more about these two ends?

Sure. Our consortium is composed of 7 partners: UniGe, the French CNRS, the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, the Greek National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos", the SME Solvionic SA, the University of Luxembourg and RINA-Consulting certifying body.

Therefore, our meetings can be quite crowded, and some people can only attend online. In this context, Wooclap helps us hear everyone’s opinions across geographical divides and keep attention levels high.

Furthermore, we are innovating the way we run project meetings by introducing crash courses on topics deemed important to empower all participants, especially the young ones. For example, not everyone is familiar with concepts like intellectual property, although they are crucial for the success of Pathfinder projects… Hence, our crash courses make use of Wooclap to ensure everyone is on board. In this context, we are also recording the courses to load them on REMAP’s YouTube channel, so that everyone, even outside the consortium, can access them and benefit from them. Then, the participant pace mode will be crucial as it will enable viewers to self-assess their level of understanding of the covered subject, in line with the FAIR principles of open science.

And how about your outreach campaigns, why is Wooclap useful in that context?

At REMAP, we value Communication activities very much.

The funding we receive from the European Innovation Council (EIC) is taxpayers’ money, so it is our duty to ensure that the public is aware of the project’s purposes. Moreover, since REMAP’s technology readiness level (TRL) is currently low, we need to ensure that the public understands both the context (the big picture), and our new technological take.

In fact, our research studies will pass from a fundamental character to a prototype demonstration that will culminate into a new generation microstructured photovoltaic device by the end of the project. Hence, probing the public’s opinion is important because our proposed technology may have features that raise legitimate concerns that we did not consider, or the public may conceive valuable concepts or see interesting connections we did not foresee. To this end, we set up participant pace sessions with Wooclap so that people who attend our outreach events can get back home and find a repository of information concerning REMAP’s goals including videos of our experimental demonstrations to refresh their minds and answer questions about the science behind the scenes, for their own personal development.

Lastly, Wooclap enables us to gather feedback from the public that helps us assess the perception of our research and how we can improve both the research itself and how we communicate it to society. A particular attention is devoted, for example, to the gender distribution of the participants, and on whether they find that our proposed technology could have an embedded gender bias, or despite not having one, could ultimately benefit or damage a specific gender more than another.

Do you have any recommendations or suggestion to further improve Wooclap?

Perhaps one feature that could bring added value to Wooclap is a “doodle” type of question. Within a consortium, not everyone is comfortable with sharing sensitive data about their agendas to technological giants. On the other hand, manually setting a “doodle” type of question with Wooclap can be rather time consuming. If embedded into the Wooclap family of questions, this is a sort of functionality that could find the interest of many consortia.