OERu International Partners Meeting

Purpose

During the OERu International Partners Meeting, there is an opportunity to harness the network and build on the excellent skills of the participants. This is an opportunity to review the structure of the review tool, and to establish the core themes of the document to be submitted for consideration.

Activity outline

Step One

• You will need to select one of the existing tools from the list found under 'Resources' below. You'll be working with this document for the activity, so your facilitator will try to ensure that there is a range of resources selected within the group.

Step Two

• Pair with another participant (or larger groups if preferred).

Step Three

• Working in this collaborative document [here], identify the key themes that within each review. This means that you are looking for the individual components that are assessed/reviewed by the document. For example, you may see that there are criteria for Student Support, Orientation to the Course, Accessibility, etc. Record all of your themes.

Step Four

• Regroup. The facilitator will look for consensus across the documents, and work with the participants to create a 'master list' of these themes. During this step, you will need to consider the context of the OERu and the applicability to their courses. For example - a theme might focus on 'face to face teaching'. As the OERu doesn't offer face-to-face teaching, this theme won't appear on the final document (although there could be components of good learning and teaching practice that inform other themes).

Step Five

• We'll consider each of these themes to now be Criteria. The criteria is a broad statement of intent (for example, a Criteria could be 'Active learning principles inform the design of the course'). We now need to provide prompts to collect evidence that this criteria is being met, and these prompts will be called Indicators. These Indicators should be something that can be viewed upon review, and presented as evidence that a Criteria is met (partially, or in full), or not present.
• Remember that the intent of this document is two fold: (1) To provide an evidence-based approach to reviewing a course, with examples of how the course has met the Criteria and Indicators, and (2) To provide guidance for new course designers in the OERu. The document then becomes a 'blueprint' or series of 'guide posts' in course design (easier to design against the review process, rather than be reviewed after the fact).

Resources for this Activity

• eCampus Ontario Required Elements in an online course [here]
• Athabasca University Quality Rubric [here]
• California State University [here]
• USQ StudyDesk Expectations Document [here]

Google Spreadsheet for this Activity