OERu course sprint planning

OERu

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Outdated page. DS4OER course materials completed and inaugural DS4OER design sprint offered on 9 & 10 June 2015 at Otago Polytechnic.

Key points

The OERu is planning a virtual course sprint modelled on the open source code sprint concept to help partners kick start their nominated developments and familiarise themselves with open collaborative design and the OERu supported technologies during a focused period designed for sharing using synchronous sessions in conjunction with asynchronous work in the wiki. This process will be used to inform and refine the development of the OERu partners manual The virtual course sprint will be designed for reuse and incorporation into the Digital Skills for Collaborative OER Development micro course which could supplement and support future professional development in the OERu network. The course is being developed live with links from the outline page

Volunteer coaches

• Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation.
• Meg Goodine, Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Role of coaches

1. Facilitate synchronous sessions

Format of the sprint model

The OERu virtual course sprint model is structured around three components:

1. Synchronous hangout sessions for introducing challenges and sharing experiences
2. Sprint challenges where participants produce things for their OERu courses
3. Social media interaction and peer review.
4. Using the tools incorporated into OERu courses.

Beneficial pre-knowledge

We recognise that participants bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. We don't specify perquisites for participation, and the purpose of the course sprint is to welcome new participants to the OERu family and how our network operates. If you're looking to get the most from the course sprint experience you will find the following useful:

1. A passion to return to the core values of education, namely to share knowledge freely.
2. A registered account on WikiEducator. If you don't have one, we recommend that you create an account before joining the course sprint.
3. Knowledge of:
   • What constitutes an OER resource,
   • Copyright in a digital age.
   • Open licenses and remix compatibility
4. Basic blog publishing skills and use of microblog technologies (support tutorials provided).

Overview of the pedagogical approach

The course is based on hands-on course sprint challenges where participants are required to produce drafts for their course design that are real artefacts in a live wiki community.

Each learning pathway will:

1. State the objectives
2. Include a video signpost as a stimulus for the learning pathway
3. Incorporate a succinct overview and guidelines relating to the topic
4. Require substantive course sprint challenges utilising existing resources on the internet. Participants will share the outputs through personal blog posts.

Tentative sessions

1. Basic wiki skills challenge (to develop basic wiki skills for authoring OER courses)
2. Design blueprint challenge (to develop a high level conceptual design for the prospective course)
3. Course outline challenge (to develop a draft outline of the learning pathways for the course and corresponding subpages)
4. OER inventory challenge (to source resources for reuse and remix)
5. Digital skills challenge (to cover range of relevant digital skills for building OER courses)
6. Learning pathway challenge (to develop a representative sample of learning materials)
7. Pedagogical templates challenge (to improve the pedagogy using feature in WikiEducator)
8. OERu theming challenge (tweaks to make your OERu course snapshot rock and impress friends.)

Live development pages

• Course outline

Ideas for learning challenges

The course will be structured around a number of "learn-by-doing" learning challenges supported by stimulus resources available on the Internet and a few guiding pages in the respective learning pathway. In this section, feel free to add ideas for suitable learning challenges:

• Sourcing and sharing openly licensed images: (Session: Digital skills) Scan the Wikimedia Commons for images relating to your course. Identify a "gap", that is an image you would like to use in your course which is not available on the Commons. Search the web for an appropriately licensed open image, upload this to the Commons and embed on a page in WikiEducator. --Mackiwg 05:57, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
• Searching with images not text: (Session: Digital Skills) Watch this video which demonstrates searching the web with an image rather then text. In the event which you have an image you like and need another which is similar, you can search by image rather than text. This is helpful when searching for items which you can not describe like symbols, emblems or even unidentified faces. --Timothy McCallum
• Create a chart or diagram in open file format. (Session: Digital skills). The purpose of this challenge is to explore the reuse of svg graphics in creating new charts or diagrams for reuse in your course. 1) Scan svg images available on the commons for reuse; 2) Identify a chart or diagram participant will need for their course. 3) Download and install a copy of the open source Inkscape graphics editor. 4) Generate an image for your course remixing existing svg images. 5) Share your creative work on the commons. 6) Embed the image in one of your course pages in WikiEducator. --Mackiwg 06:02, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
• Create a video or screencast. (Session: Digital skills). Most modern courseware has videos. They can be micro-lectures of professors talking into the camera, discussions with students, screencasts with modeling software, "field trips" to labs, or even TED-style stories with slides. 1) Make a video 2) Upload to YouTube or Vimeo with an open license 3) Share on WikiEducator. --MariaDroujkova 12 August 2014
  • Thanks Maria -- good suggestion. I'll build a learning challenge along these lines and ping you when I have a draft. --Mackiwg 22:59, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
• Design Blueprint challenge - take one of the subjects that have been put forward in the audit and convert the info known thus far to the Design Blueprint format, and look at what else need to be decided on. If a number of people did this, perhaps with a buddy (?) then could we spend the last part of the challenge reviewing the newly published wiki pages ie blueprints and providing feedback using... comments features on the wiki or something similar? Slambert 07:52, 29 August 2014 (UTC)