Wikiversity Offers a Course on Online Educational Resources

Wikiversity is organising an online course “Composing free and open online educational resources”. Starting on March 3, 2008, the course is designed for teachers and teacher-students who do not have prior knowledge or skills related to free and open education resources.

The course, which follows another training initiative by David Wiley hold late 2007 (Introduction to Open Education), aims at familiarising participants with the idea of co-creation of learning resources.

It is to build teachers’ skills to find, create and share free and open education resources online and to be familiar with the concepts of:

• free and open culture,
• free, libre, open educational resources,
• commons based peer-production,
• educational resource design,
• online study project and
• media production.

Teacher in primary school in northern
Laos,© Wikimedia Commons

The participants will be expected to create a free and open education resource in the language of their choice, learn to take digital images, to record audio and video and to use these media as educational resources. The estimated workload is 4-6 hours per week, and the course assignments will be submitted on the participant's blog, as well as LeMill or Wikiversity.

This initiative is an important move towards empowering teachers worldwide to create and share teaching materials, promoting open licensing for educational content and diversifying the open educational content currently available, which UNESCO has been advocating since the very first meeting on open education in 2002, as well as through initiatives like the Virtual University and eLearning and the Open Training Platform.

Similar online courses, starting in September 2008, are also proposed by the Global Virtual University , a consortium of universities under the auspices of the United Nations University (UNU): "Pedagogy in Online Learning – The International Online Tutor Course" and "E-Course Development and Online Course Leadership".

More information on the course can be found on the Wikiversity website at
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Composing_free_and_open_online_educational_resources.