Course Content Presented as an Open Educational Resource

Instructor Profiles:
Leslie Chan is a Senior Lecturer at University of Toronto at Scarborough, and the Program Supervisor for the International Development Studies program. He is internationally renowned for his work on promoting Open Access to scholarly publications.
Stian Håklev is a PhD student in Curriculum, Teaching and Learning who wrote his MA thesis on Open Courses in Chinese universities.

Essential Idea:
To disseminate the course material outside of the course context, and model for the students the kind of open knowledge practices that are discussed in the course, Chan and Håklev decided to post all public materials in the course on an open wiki-platform accessible to the world. They also licensed all the self-produced material under an open Creative Commons license to enable reuse and wider sharing.

The easy editing meant that the weekly course pages could contain text, links to other relevant resources and readings, and they could also embed their own short video lectures, and other relevant videos from the web. The students appreciated the diversity of material, and found that the mini-lectures, and engaging presentations from TED and other video sites helped make the theoretical readings come alive. The fact that the website was public, meant that others not in the course could also access it, and the instructors received favorable feedback from visitors who found the material useful.

Benefits for Students:

  • Models the innovative use of the collaborative platform and open licenses for knowledge sharing
  • Ties together material produced by the instructors with external multimedia material curated by the instructors
  • The wiki can also be edited by students, and was used to provide comments and questions, and for co-creation of knowledge

Tips and Tricks:

  • There are several free wiki-platforms, and University of Toronto at Scarborough provides a WordPress blog which can also be used to share material outside of the course-scope
  • Courses can be enlivened with the careful use of video, webcast and multimedia resources
  • A number of shorter and more targeted mini-lectures is easier to digest, and use for active learning, than long two-hour lecture recordings