Life cycle of an (open) online course designed as an OER:

The case of Facilitating OnlineTony Carr @tony_emerge

Nicola Pallitt @nicolapallitt OE Global Conference, Cape Town

10 March 2017

Overview & aims

‘Home grown’ approaches to open education in Africa are emerging

Metaphor of life cycles for thinking about the evolution & iterations associated with an open course

Facilitating Online has a current timeline of 9 years as an OER & online course

Aim

To share…

Our approach to course design & collaborative practice to enable open education in Africa & beyond

Timeline of the evolution of the course thus far & a way of thinking about the life cycle of a course developed as an OER

Discuss learning design of OER-based courses & continuous improvement using open education approaches

While this case is set in Africa, the model presented may raise useful questions for anyone thinking about the evolution of open courses in other contexts.

Within the broader landscape…

About the course

Facilitated learning activitiesStructured synchronous & asynchronous participation (entirely online, but not entirely flexible):

1 Preparatory week; 5 Activity weeks; 2 Consolidation weeks

Requires up to 8 hours of participation per week

8-week course

Facilitating Online : Course Model & Principles

Aimed primarily at change agent educational technologists & educators within the African Higher Educational sector

What about the course is open?

OER Course Leader’s Guide - course content is accessible

Course models and promotes use of open practices

Course is taught using open source institutional LMS

What about the course is not open?Application & selection criteria, free to public but

not private sector

How open is this?

http://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/7495

Enabling re-use: Open practices & courseware

Platform agnostic materials enable easy reuse and adaptation

Often OERs enter the world through repositories and little is known about their impact beyond the number of downloads

In this case the course model, its facilitation approach and materials have been reused, revised or adapted in several contexts

Course timeline - Development (2008-2009)

Course timeline

Online course

Life cycle metaphor

OER

Open Courseware

Online course site

Learning design

Literature on learning design, reuse & (open) online courses

Adopting a learning design methodology may provide a vehicle for enabling better design and reuse of Open Educational Resources (OERs) (Conole & Weller, 2008)

Design lifecycle (Conole 2010) for OERs

“Research regarding open educational resources focuses on methods of producing OER, methods of sharing OER, and the benefits of OER. Significant issues relating to OER remain unresolved...” (Wiley, Bliss & McEwen, 2013)

Iteration & innovation

Changes 2014-2016:

Larger class sizes to support more peer facilitation (little like MOOCs but not at MOOC scale)

New tools like eg. lessons easier to present materials than wiki, video embed (LMS upgrades)

Periodically updated progress reports to course participants

Third party tools (Padlet, Google Drive, WhenIsGood)

Change in Social Network activity from Facebook to LinkedIn (2015)

Approach

Questions for learning designers of open online courses & OERs to think about:

Does your toolbox match your context?

How flexible are the tools you’ve selected?

What might designing for sustainability mean for your course? Does this include re-use?

How can you design for & support learning journeys that go beyond the course objectives? (just meeting objectives are not enough)

What drives your OER - what do you & others believe is worth sharing? (might be different things to different people, but build on core objectives & artefacts)

Discussion

Iterations take time - can take many life cycles to achieve reuse? When is the height of an OER’s ‘career’ and can it ‘die’?

Roadmap for designing an (open) online course - is this the same roadmap as designing a ‘reuser’ experience or designing for both from the start?