Transcript
Patrina Law
Welcome to our course on how to make an open online course.
It has been written by the Free Learning team at The Open University in the UK and is based on our experience of writing courses for OpenLearn, the University’s free learning platform. OpenLearn has been in existence since 2006 and reaches over 5 million people a year. The platform showcases the best of the University’s teaching by way of courses, short videos and learning activities. Many of the hundreds of courses hosted there are adaptations of our formal curriculum taught to our undergraduate and postgraduate students.
As a team, we are all excited by open online learning and the impact it can have, and commission and develop innovative new free courses every day. For us, this activity is about open online learning as an outreach mechanism, for professional development and in support of our students.
We decided to write this course because developing an online course, specifically one for open use, is something we are frequently asked to advise on. It can be different to writing for closed groups, classroom settings or, for that matter, massive groups. The course will explain how best to plan an open online course, the basics of assessing online, the basics of social learning, where to find and reuse existing free content, how to approach publishing and platform hosting, and the tips and tricks of search engine optimisation – in other words, getting your course found.
We hope you find it to be a useful tool in planning and developing your course.