New course: Composing open courses

I'm working on a new course, Composing Open Courses, on Wikiversity. I'm aiming to keep it very simple, with 3 assignments as the focus, and a range of topics to support the completion of those assignments. It is primarily to support the people at the Centre for School Leadership, Learning and Development, based at Charles Darwin University. They are interested in what model of development I would recommend they take, and this is it:

1. Develop a unit outline on Wikiversity
2. Create a course website for announcements, documentation and communication channels
3. Use Wikipedia to manage as much of the information and resources to do with the course as possible

I think this model is simple enough as to not pose too bigger challenge. Some of the people at CSLLD are very open to 'open education' ideas, others are frustrated by Moodle and looking for a different way, and others have not really begun to think about it.

I'm reckoning that there will be few arguments that Wikipedia is a primary reference point for most people these days, and that teachers ought to know the inner workings of that project, and work out how they can help ensure that the information relating to their subject areas are as good as possible. One way is to use Wikipedia as a platform to manage their information and resources. If they find a good reading, add it in to the relevant Wikipedia articles as a citation or external link. If they find a good graph, photo, video or audio recording, negotiate copyrights and load it to Wikimedia Commons (and other channels). Simply put, I think Wikipedia and its related project spaces helps people to develop disciplined best practice, in a highly popular and relevant space.

I've long thought that using the popular, and readily available Internet for education is a way to maintain relevance and improve access and meta cognitive learning outcomes. And so I'm encouraging people to take their unit outlines, make them human-readable, and list them on Wikiversity. Include links and resources, and I suggest focusing on developing equally relevant and publicly useful assignments in that Wikiversity course outline.

Once the outline is fully developed from the basic text version of its first draft, I'm asking them to consider creating a website for their course, using a simple platform like Blogger, where they can post announcements, resources, and other information, that is accessible and readily usable on devices such as phones. Taking it further again, I'm also suggesting that they carefully consider what communication channels they might turn on for their course. Might they use the blog post and comment features alone, or will they add email as well. Could it be effective to create spaces on Facebook or LinkedIn perhaps?

Anyway, I hope my colleagues at CSLLD will consider this model and give it a go. I'm perhaps most experienced in developing courses this way, as opposed to more closed courses developed on Moodle or Blackboard, and I've spent nearly 10 years trying to argue why those types of systems are helping to make teaching work even less relevant, and less reliable.. but I won't get started on that topic again. Let's just do it and see.