Learning environment

The Open education practice pages hosted on WikiEducator (the course website) provides the framework for your studies including the course guides, study units, course shedule, e-learning activities and assignments to support your learning. Participation in this course requires learners to establish their own personal learning environment incorporating a number of web-based tools. You will use your personal learning environment to document your learning and to connect with other learners taking this course. This course utilises a number of MOOC-like features, so if you are new to this kind of learning you should spend a little time setting familiarising yourself with the OERu course environment.

Activity

A free content video streamed from Vimeo Neal Gillis and Dave Cormier. The Open education practice course requires learners to establish a personal learning environment. This course also uses a number of features and pedagogical approaches associated with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Download and read "7 Things you should know about personal learning environments" (Pdf version). Watch the short video, Success in a MOOC by Neal Gillis and Dave Cormier. In this section of the course, we will execute the first two steps recommended by Neil Gillis and Dave Cormier in the video above. Orient yourself: Familiarise yourself with the learning environment so you can find what you are looking for. Declare yourself: Set up the technologies where your thoughts and reflections will be published and acquiring the knowledge and tools to connect with fellow learners.

Finding your way around the Open education practice course website

Orient yourself

Do you know the answers to any of the following: Where should I start? Where do I find the course materials? Where are the assignments? Where do free OERu learners go to get support? How do I communicate with fellow learners? How do I know who is studying this course with me?

The best way to find the answers to these questions is to spend a few minutes exploring the course website, navigation links and subpages.

You should start by visiting the course homepage. In the beginning you may get lost, so it's a good idea to bookmark this page in your browser.

Apart from the course description information, the course homepage provides access to the two main components of the course structure used for OERu courses (see the navigation links at the top of your browser.):

• Course guide -- Read this first because it contains the course aims, instructions for getting started and the assignments.
• StudyDesk -- Which contains links to all the course materials including the course schedule.

Finally, the Getting started page in the Course guide provides information on the website accounts you will need to participate in this specific OERu course.