Digital skills for collaborative OER development/2016 Session 9

Dear DS4OER participants

Welcome to Session 9 of the syllabus on Publishing a course site. These instructions are for your Tuesday 29 and Wednesday 30 March 2016.

We will use the WordPress content management system for publishing your course site from the outline page you created in WikiEducator. I have established course sites on course.oeru.org for those participants who competed the request, so you don't need to follow the instructions for setting up a WordPress site on OpenShift or installing your own Wordpress image. I have also inserted the widget syntax on your outline pages.

Setting up your own WordPress install (Optional)

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

(Note: If you are using the course.oeru.org WordPress installation - you can skip instructions relating to installing your own WordPress instance.)

Remember - this is a prototype course

This is only second course we are running using the snapshot script for hosting your own WordPress installation and we are improving the tools incrementally. Consequently, our experience with the common mistakes learners may make when setting up a course site are limited. We share these open source technologies in good faith that you may find them useful.

Course evaluation

This is the last session in the DS4OER course. Unfortunately, I will be travelling internationally with limited Internet activity. However, Dave Lane, our Open Source Technologist at the Foundation will be available to answer any questions you post in the feed.

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/ICDE Chair in OER.