EDT4OL/Portfolio/Learning contract



Given the high levels of facilitation support and corresponding technology requirements for this course, places are restricted to 30 students per cohort. We want learners who qualify for this course to succeed, and are targeting high completion rates. Learners are therefore required to sign a learning contract to gain entry into the course.

In our experience, free open online courses have low completion rates, with the majority of learners who register not necessarily planning to allocate the time required for completion. This is why we require a signed commitment through a learning contract for this course. However, we do not wish to exclude anyone from the opportunity to learn new skills, and all course materials are openly accessible without the need to register on the course website. However, access to a number of the open source publishing technologies will be restricted to candidates who achieve entry through the submission of an acceptance portfolio, which includes the requirement to sign a learning contract.

The OER Foundation publishes technical recipes for hosting the technologies used on this course on the tech.oeru.org site for any institution to replicate if they wish to reuse this course for their own training purposes.

Working individually or as a team
In this course, you can work individually or collaboratively as a team. We encourage team submissions because OER development lends itself to co-operative design and development.

Course Badges and the Certificate of Completion is issued to individuals, irrespective of whether you are working on your own or as a team member. Using a wiki authoring model, we are able to track the individual editing contributions of team members. There are different learning contracts for individuals and teams - please see below.

We use a self-organising model for teams. Working in a team with a few colleagues at your institution or wider professional network is an effective way to support each other in professional development. Please read the following guidelines if your are interested in working as a team:


 * Teams must appoint a co-ordinator who takes responsibility for organising and collecting signatures of individual team members on the learning contract for teams. The facilitators do not take any responsibility for organising individual teams. (You should organise your own meetings to prepare for the completion of the learning contract).
 * Teams are restricted to a maximum of 5 team members. If you wish to work as a larger group, consider creating two or more sub-teams, each with their own coordinater.
 * Each member of the team must individually submit an acceptance portfolio for approval. If any member of the proposed team does not meet the individual requirements for the acceptance portfolio, they will be removed from the team. As places are restricted for each cohort, we must provide an equal opportunity for every prospective candidate to gain entry.
 * A copy of the collective Team Learning Contract must be signed by each team member and submitted individually by each teach member preparing an acceptance portfolio.