Digital skills for collaborative OER development/2016 Session 5

Dear DS4OER participants

Welcome to Session 5 of the syllabus on Outlining a course. These instructions are for your Wednesday 16 March 2016.

Recap

The previous sessions on developing a course description and design blueprint combined with the visualisation exercise associated with developing a storyboard should help you in chunking and sequencing of the individual pages for a course outline. Moreover, your basic wiki skills will enable you to publish a draft outline in the wiki.

Outlining a course

Today's session signals a shift from design thinking to implementation. In this session you will progress your design ideas by publishing your course outline for one or more learning pathways in the wiki. You will use the individual pages you suggest during this session for populating with actual content later in the course. The idea is to determine the sequence of individual pages. The art of design is about creating within constraints, and this requires knowledge of the limitations of the technology we are using, but more importantly an understanding of how the technology we are using to publish course sites actually works.

Here are the links you need for Session 5:


 * Learning materials: Outlining a course
 * Learning challenge: Course outline challenge

At first glance, determining the sequence of a number of pages for a learning pathway may appear to be a trivial activity. However, you will discover that there are a wide range of considerations. Fortunately, our open design model is iterative and you will have the freedom to refine or change the sequence as your design matures when you start developing the content for the individual pages.

Getting ready for publishing a course site

We have two ways in which DS4OER participants can experiment with publishing course sites which we will cover during Session 9:


 * 1) Setting up a "domain of your own" using Openshift. In short you will manage and host your own WordPress instance for free using open source technology.
 * 2) Using the OER Foundation WordPress site (we will provide free hosting for the duration of the course.) We will continue to provide hosting for OERu designated courses for staff working at OERu partner institutions because the costs are covered through membership fees.

Option 2 will be easier if you are unfamiliar with web publishing. However, the course instructions for setting up your own instance will remain open and you will be able to do this any time in the future. Unfortunately, as a small non-profit we do not have the fiscal resources to provide unlimited hosting services indefinitely - but during this course, active participants will be able to see how this works using our technology infrastructure. You will not loose access to any of your source content because it resides in WikiEducator.

If you would like the OERF to host your course site for the duration of the DS4OER course, please complete the online registration form.

Have a great day!

Wayne UNESCO/ICDE Chair in OER.