Digital skills for collaborative OER development/Announcement Session 9

Dear DS4OER participants

Welcome to Session 9 of the syllabus on Publishing a course site. These instructions are for your Friday 1 May 2015.

We will use the WordPress content management system for publishing your course site from the outline page you created in WikiEducator. In DS4OER we encourage learners to install their own WordPress using the custom OERu course theme as part of your digital skills development on this course. We will show you how to do this.

Here are the links to the course resources you will need for Session 9:


 * Learning materials: Publishing a course site
 * Learning challenge: Course site challenge

Remember - this is a prototype course

This is the first course we are running using the snapshot script for hosting your own WordPress installation. Consequently, we do not have prior experience with the common mistakes learners may make when setting up a course site or technologies we have been unable to test. If you encounter any problems, please report these issues as questions on the FAQ page in the wiki. We apologise in advance for any bugs you may encounter, but appreciate your assistance in reporting any issues. The technology definitely works because I have been hosting the DS4OER course site on my own WordPress installation using the same hosting services we are recommending for learners. (For the record, I'm not a programmer, so you should also be able to do this.) However, we do not have access to proprietary operating systems and all the browser software versions learners will be using, so we may encounter a few issues.

Course evaluation

This is the last session in the DS4OER course. However, I will be around next week and will continue to monitor the course feed. As an open course, the course materials will remain accessible.

Please complete the short course evaluation survey.

Your responses to the course evaluation are used to improve the design of future open courses facilitated by the OERu. The aggregated responses are also used to provide feedback to the donors and sponsors of the the DS4OER course.

I thank you for your gift of knowledge and your time to help improve open education initiatives at the OER Foundation.

Wayne UNESCO/COL/ICDE Chair in OER.