The BEST Network is thrilled to announce that Slice has won a Platinum medal in the 1EdTech 2022 Learning Impact Awards. As part of their Learning Impact Awards, each year 1EdTech recognizes innovative uses of technology that impact learning and foster collaboration in education. 1EdTech is a consortium focused on advancing education technology innovation, interoperability and learning impact.

This year, 34 ground-breaking education technology projects were recognized with the 8 medal winners selected by a panel of experts and peer voters. Slice was recognized for our work in facilitating inter-institutional sharing of large, high-quality images.

The Challenge

In the early 2000s, the teaching of microscopy-based disciplines was revolutionized with the digitization of glass slide sets. Disseminating these large, specialized images (1-20GB) to students was challenging. It previously required purpose-built servers and software leading to costly duplication of resources and technology across the higher education sector and each institution’s resources were siloed.

The Solution

2022 marks the ten-year anniversary of the BEST Network which brought together academics from leading medical schools to establish Slice in response to this problem. Cloud infrastructure provided by Amazon AWS enables our image-based learning and teaching platform to be shared cost effectively by an unlimited number of students and their teachers.

Slice hosts over 22,000 images, including virtual slides, from institutional collections which allows academics to choose any image that meets their needs for use in classroom activities worldwide. The Slice tools are designed specifically for education and include LMS integration, image annotation and image organization.

We are honored to have our work recognized and it’s thanks to the vision of our founders that we’ve been able to reimagine collaboration in education. Thank you to all of our member institutions for their continued support. We are grateful for the hard work and dedication of our technology partner, OpenLearning. Thank you to 1EdTech for the time and effort that has gone into putting on the awards and congratulations to all of the winners and honorable mentions in the 2022 Learning Impact Awards.

Our video and PDF submission for the learning impact awards.

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Thank you to Professor Nicholas Hawkins, Dr Claire Aland, Dr Suja Pillai,
Dr Fahmida Sonya, Associate Professor Vinod Gopalan and Astrid Tjahja for their contributions to our submission.

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To learn more and discuss using Slice, contact s.dowdell@best.edu.au.

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