Open Education 2014

Open online course design and development is now part of the higher education landscape of some institutions. The presenters were involved in an Open Educational Resource universitas (OERu) redevelopment project that involved the adaptation and customization of an existing introductory open art course so that a new open online course could be made available to OERu partners and any interested learners globally. ART 100: Art Appreciation and Techniques was repurposed from open educational resources (OER) made available by the Saylor Foundation and has been redesigned with the intent of making it more flexible for reuse, redistribution, revision and remixing for different users and contexts. A big part of the course redevelopment project was to pilot the use of MediaWiki as both a development and a publishing platform for open distributed learning. Technical barriers and other challenges made the project more difficult than originally anticipated. Väljataga, T., Põldoja, H., & Laanpere, M. (2011, p. 67) point out that, "although open online course design solves many educational problems and challenges, at the same time it also creates new ones." In this workshop, we will discuss several critical technological, and other, considerations and challenges of designing and developing a course for open online delivery, using OER. We will also outline some of the promises of such a venture.