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 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 the course. 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 should they wish to reuse this course for their own training purposes.

Description

Learning contract
A learning contract is a document signed by the learner providing clear expectations for prospective EDT4OL students. The learning contract outlines what the learner promises to do to achieve successful completion of the course.

The learning contract also specifies what the course facilitator(s) will do to support your learning journey.

The learning contract establishes a social contract between the learner and the course facilitator and relies on the conviction and personal integrity of the parties to the agreement.

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 cooperative design and development.

Course Badges and the Certificate of Completion is issue for 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 - see below.

We use a self-organising model for teams to constitute themsleves. Please read the following guidelines if your are interested in working as a team:

• Teams must appoint a coordinator 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 constituting or 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 constituting 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 footing for every prospective candidate to gain entry.
• A copy of the collective Team Learning Contract must be signed by each team member and is submitted individually by each teach member preparing an acceptance portfolio.