Digital skills for collaborative OER development/Announcement FAQs

Dear DS4OER participants

If you have signed up for DS4OER recently, we extend a very warm welcome. If you missed the instructions for Session 1, you will find a copy on the course site.

We need your help to develop FAQs to support future learners on DS4OER

A key point of difference with OER is the ability for learners and educators to collaborate on the development of OER resources.

It has become tradition at the OER Foundation that the prototype offering of an OERu course is used to generate the frequently asked questions (FAQs) for each of the learning pathways for future iterations of the course. At the end of each learning pathway you will find a FAQ page with a link to the source page in the wiki. See for example the FAQ page for the Orientation learning pathway.

We extend an open invitation to all DS4OER participants to help us populate the FAQ pages with relevant questions (and corresponding answers) for future editions of this course. We have found this to be a good way to develop authentic FAQs based on your own learning experiences on this course. If you have a question you feel should be included on the FAQ page, please visit the link provided on the relevant page and post these directly in WikiEducator. Don't be missed by your absence!

We thank you in advance for your gift of knowledge.

A note about the DS4OER course site

In many parts of the developing world IT departments are understaffed and may not have the resources to support the hosting of open online courses. This course aims to empower educators with the freedom to host their own course sites at no cost using free tiered cloud services and open source technologies. In this course we will develop a collection of wiki pages which can be harvested for publishing on your own course site using the popular WordPress content management system. At the OER Foundation, we "eat our own dog food" and the DS4OER course site uses the same technology you will be using to publish your learning pathways you develop openly in the wiki. For example, I have set up my "own" domain on OpenShift by Redhat Linux and installed WordPress which is hosting the DS4OER materials. I'm not a programmer - I'm a teacher by choice. If I can do this, so can you and we will show you how.

As I mentioned yesterday, this is a prototype and no doubt there will be a few teething problems with the technology. I should also note that the course pages are dynamic in the sense that you will be assisting us to populate the FAQ pages. Should you find a spelling mistake, you can fix this directly on the wiki. (Here is the outline of the wiki pages I have used to generate the course site.) The dynamic nature of the course materials means that I must update the course site from time to time. Should you visit the course site while I'm running the update script, just return to the site after 5 minutes.

Thanks for your help in moving the adoption of open education forward with new and exciting technologies which have the potential to empower all educators to design, develop and distribute open online courses.

With kind regards Wayne UNESCO/COL/ICDE Chair in OER.