Wayne--Actually, I am not the person to ask about the course design platform. We use Moodle Rooms for course delivery, but we have designed a cloud-based, "platform-independent" process for development that allows course materials to be delivered via any kind of device, including tablets and even smart phones. My understanding is that we can share course materials with any LMS. I will try to obtain the details so that our partners might have some more information about it.
Thanks Mark,
I'd appreciate that -- Feel free to invite your tech person to respond in this forum.
Wayne--here is what I received from Steve Phillips in my office, who has been working with a team to finish the Critical Reasoning course:
All of the course materials will be available in Word .doc format, so they can be easily remixed, reused, and uploaded to any LMS. At the bottom of every page will be a download button (identical to the way we set up our open PLA100/200 courses). The Google Site shell only exists to provide students (and our staff) with a more attractive and polished way of looking at the course.
In terms of micro-courses, while our course was not designed this way (and as far as I can tell, neither was the UNISA course), there is enough of a thematic link between modules 1&2, and 3&4 to make two micro courses, and module 5 could be expanded to essentially a mini English composition course.
Hi Marc,
Thanks for getting back to us - I appreciate that.
That's a clever way to use Google Sites to provide a navigation shell for a collection of course documents to provide a more attractive and polished way of looking at the course.
The OERu course snapshot is not that far removed from the approach you are using. In stead of documents we use individual wiki pages (which can be downloaded in open document format or pdf.) The course snapshot provides the navigation, look and feel with the advantages of a CSS framework for responsive design. We have the added advantage of a detailed edit history for collborative / distributed authoring and the ability to target specific instances for the snapshot. The wiki also provides a good way to manage the metadata of openly licensed images.
Yes, with access to the Word documents we will be able to automate getting a draft into the wiki. We will need to have a think about images, in particular the metadata for openly licensed images embedded in the course resources.
Correct, when the Unisa course was first nominated, we were not thinking about micro-courses. But that's my point - if the OER development was conducted openly -- we would have had the opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of a micro-format and potentially have avoided duplication of effort ;-).
No worries - design is an iterative process and we are all learning with each new iteration of the OERu courseware.
Looking forward to seeing the open version of the Critical Reasoning course. This will be a major edition to the OERu collection.