Digital skills for collaborative OER development/Announcement Session 1

Dear DS4OER participants

Welcome to the prototype offering of the OERu's Digital skills for collaborative OER development (DS4OER) course. These instructions are for your Monday 13 and Tuesday 14 April 2015.

The OERu envisions a world where all learners will have more affordable access to higher education.

The DS4OER course was developed to build capacity in the design and development of open online courses using OER. A key feature of this course is the ability for any educator to host their own course site using the popular open source WordPress content management system assembled from a collection of wiki pages. During DS4OER you will learn how to publish and administer your own course site.

Overview of Session 1

During Session 1 you will familiarise yourself with the DS4OER course site. You will also establish your personal learning environment and introduce yourself using your course blog.

Course site: http://ds4oer.oeru.org/ (bookmark this page).

Please share the gift of knowledge and help us by completing the optional OERu new participant survey. This information will be used to assist the OERu with the future design of free courses with pathways to achieving credible credentials.

Resources for session 1


 * Start here
 * Orientation

Don't forget to register the url of the public view of your blog. We need this to harvest your posts for the aggregated course feed.

Important links


 * Course syllabus
 * Aggregated course feed

Welcome aboard and I look forward to seeing you online!

Your facilitator Wayne Mackintosh UNESCO/COL/ICDE Chair in OER

Notes about the DS4OER prototype

We acknowledge the funding support of the New Zealand National Commission for UNESCO which has supported the development of the course materials and the open source technologies we are using to enable educators around the world to widen access to open online courses using OER. As a prototype, we may encounter a few teething problems and we thank you in advance for your understanding and feedback to help us improve the technologies. For example, the OER Foundation will need to update the course site from time to time. Should you visit the site while we are running the update script, please return after a few minutes. However, we will keep these updates to a minimum.