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.

Redeveloping wikiversity course: Composing Educational Resouces

I've been meaning to reuse Teemu Leinonen and co's course on Wikiversity, Composing Free and Open Online Educational Resources, and rejig it for a rerun. Finally I have been able to get to that item on the to-do list.

At first I was considering editing the original course slightly - but not deviating much from the original content. I left a message on the course's discussion page, indicating my intentions.. it didn't appear as though anyone had any objections. On consideration though, I realised that I want to change the content quite a bit.

I want to move the focus away from open educational resources, and onto educational resources generally. The open access and reuse will still be a major component, in fact you could call it a given, weaving its way throughout everything.. 'open ed resources, is there any other way?' in other words. But I also want to focus attention on the skill of searching for reusable content, managing 'libraries' of what you find, and finally how to create - or compose your own educational resources, without getting too bogged down on the intricacies of open ed.

I also want to move it more in the direction of off-line and analogue media as well, to address Internet access issues, which many people mistake as being 'developing nation' needs only.. NZ and Australia therefore are clearly developing nations then. I have some ideas on how online educational resources can be complimentary to things like community radio and news paper - including the communicative aspects of Web2.. ie talk back radio working together with podcasting, and letters-to-the-editor in a similar way.

So, I'm chipping away at this new version on Wikiversity. Composing Educational Resources.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution) license.