Planning your open course - before you build it

1. Audience and purpose

You need to consider the audience and purpose for your open course/resource.  Who will use it and for what reasons? Do they have specific needs or constraints? These are important questions you will need to think about when creating your open course.  You may have a specific target audience in mind with very particular needs or you might be aiming at a broader range of people who have a general interest in your subject.  You cannot possibly know the context of every potential learner studying your course, however, to help you make the course cover as wide a range of users, needs and motivations for studying as possible, you could draw up personas of specific users to help you plan how to make the activities and content of your course accessible and engaging for everyone.

Write the learning outcomes of your course/resource as you consider audience and purpose. You may find the guide How to write learning outcomes by Bridget Winwood and Alison Purvis will help when writing learning outcomes which are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely.

2. Learning Design

Your open course or resource may be very short, simple and straightforward; however you still need to think about learning design and how your audience might benefit from a well-designed resource.

See Learning Design at The Open University and the OU Learning Design team blog for more information about learning design.

Alternatively, you may want to implement a less structure lead approach (considered by some as 'disruptive') to your course design by collaborating with others within your space to create materials together and move them around as the course design emerges from different content contributions by each author. 

3. Structure and Metadata

It is good practice to structure your open course or resource from the start.  This is partly because moving things around might be more time consuming later.  However, if you are opting for a very simple, single page design or are collaborating with others in your space create the course, this will be less important at the start, though you may want to review the structure later.

Structuring the course can mean creating a storyboard for your course and collating a set of assets before beginning to decide how best to display and deliver the course. It will also help you decide which Moodle resources and activities are the most suitable to use for each part of the 'story' of your course.

You need to ensure that you complete the metadata (data about your course) to make it easy to find in online searches - if useful metadata is not included, then search engines will not find your course, even though OpenLearn Create is Google indexed.  Metadata includes keywords or tags, labels and descriptions. 

It is usually a good idea for an open course to have the following elements:

• Course overview - A section with useful information about the resource (you might call this 'week 0' or 'before you start')
• Learning outcomes which explain to potential learners what they can expect to learn by studying the course - see How to write learning outcomes (a guide by academics at Sheffield Hallam University).
  A good way of writing learning outcomes is to articulate them as active and think about them as what the learner will be able to do as a result of studying your course, so use verbs at the start of each learning outcome.
  Example learning outcome:
  ‘Upon successful completion of this course, learners should be able to:
  1. Describe the benefits and disadvantages of using OER in distance education.’
  Verbs like ‘understand’, ‘know’, ‘reflect’ are very difficult to measure. Using active verbs enables students to use the activities to measure how well they’ve met the learning outcomes.
  Examples of active verbs include: describe, define, discuss, calculate, apply, evaluate, compare, identify, discuss, differentiate, implement, write.
  
• A straightforward logical structure that reflects the amount of material included and the time the user might spend working through the resource - it is also helpful to provide an approximate time each activity may take to complete (for example Activity 2, Title of activity, 20 minutes).
• Overview text for each section/week/topic if the resource is divided in this way
• A Where next section for what users might do after they've completed the resource.
• Some form of evaluation of the resource (questionnaire, survey) and assessment (e.g. self-assessment, quizzes, badges)
• Acknowledgements page - essential if some of the resources you include in your resource are not your copyright and good to have for proper acknowledgement of who was involved in writing your resource.  Set up an acknowledgments page with information about authors, other contributors and a list of all resources used for which you do not own the copyright and have cleared the copyright to use. You need to include full attribution information Title, Author, Source and Licence for each resource used even if you have given attribution information with the resources elsewhere in the course (for example in a caption for an image). 
  Good examples of Acknowledgements pages include those of Introduction to Dyslexia and Inclusive Practice, Understanding Parkinson's for health and social care staff and How to make an open online course.
• A list of References for resources you have cited will show your course is based on credible, valid data as well as knowledge and experience of those involved in writing the course.

You need to decide how the resource is displayed on screen - make several hours of study more manageable for learners by dividing the material into sections, weeks or topics with each of these on a different page.  For a very short study time all the material could probably be on one page (freeform).

4. Writing the course

Although you can write directly into your open course or resource and create it online in collaboration with others, it is a good idea to do most of your drafting in a word processing package first so you can get the structure and content right.  Alternatively you could collaborate with others online to create your content using Google docs or other similar tools.

Please note, writing for online learning is not like writing a book - for guidance on how to write your online course, see How to make an open online course.

5. Copyright

In addition to text, you need to collate all the images, figures, diagrams and video / audio material you wish to use and check that you have the relevant permissions to use these resources.  It is helpful to create an inventory of these items to help you keep track of them, for example you could use or adapt the Asset register template which was created by the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland project. The template includes the following column headings:

• Asset number (can be used to identify location of asset in course materials)
• Name/title of asset (can be used in the course materials to describe the asset)
• Long description (particularly useful for describing images/diagrams/figures)
• Type (file type, e.g. PDF, jpg, doc, ppt, xls, audio or video file)
• Filename (for example, DCN1234.jpg)
• Location(s) in course (for example which section / sub section / week / activity / quiz)
• Rights/3rd party (who owns the copyright - even if all the assets are owned by you it is a good idea to record this in the asset register for the benefit of the person uploading the assets to the course)
• Clearance approved to release asset as Creative Commons (you can use this for notes about the clearance and date of copyright clearance.
• URL (URL of where the asset will appear in the course)
• Acknowledgement to be included in the course (what needs to be listed about this asset on the Acknowledgements page if the item belongs to a third party or if the organisation releasing the course wishes to retain 'all rights reserved' rather than use a Creative Commons licence for this asset)
• Actions (a place for you to record any actions/notes about the asset)

Publishing your open course or resource on OpenLearn Create carries the expectation that, where possible, the content you are reusing/creating has been released under the CC-BY-NC-SA version 4.0 creative commons licence. For all material you want to use that cannot be released under this licence you must have obtained permission to reuse and the source must be attributed accordingly in your Acknowledgements page.  Find out more about copyright (this link takes you to another website).

6. Accessibility

Accessibility is important and beneficial for everyone. It is always good practice to consider how your resource might be used by people with visual impairment, dyslexia, mental health conditions or other special requirements and it is important to understand that applying good accessibility practices consistently throughout the resource has the potential to help all learners using the resource.  

Accessibility checklist

Providing alternative format options, alternative text, checking colour contrast, content resizing, content structure, form labels, language of page, link text, keyboard navigation, captions, skip links, transcriptions of any video or audio resources and captioning of video resources are all needed to make your resource accessible to as many people as possible. 

Learners who have no disabilities find alternative formats useful, depending on the context in which they are learning. For example, transcripts can help students follow a video/audio and make notes more easily.

Images

All images you use in your resource will need long descriptions so screen reader software being used by learners who have visual impairments can tell them what is included in the image.  For example:

• A diagram, graph or flowchart which contains any text in the image must have a long description (alt description) which includes all of this text in a logical way. 
• A picture needs a description to explain what is happening in the picture.

It is best to write long descriptions for images as you are authoring a course and choosing images to use, to avoid a last-minute panic before publishing.  Ideally images need to have captions (with attribution information if the image is not yours). The Asset register template has a column for long descriptions.

Text and tables

All text should be formatted consistently, so pages of content do not look messy and hard to read, which happens if a variety of fonts, text sizes and font colours is inserted into a page from various sources. Use formatting styles or edit the text in html mode as good accessibility practice. Screen reader software will use the html formatting when navigating and reading a page out loud. 

When you copy and paste text from other software such as Word, some hidden formatting code is carried over but might not be compatible with Moodle, so the following practice will help you avoid hidden formatting code issues and provide more consistently formatted text and tables:

• Copy text into a text editor (for example Notepad) to strip out hidden code then copy from the text editor into a Moodle book, page or label. Reformat the text if necessary, using the Moodle formatting tools or switch to html editing mode if you are comfortable editing in html.
• Consistently use heading, paragraph and bullet point/numbered list styles in the Moodle formatting tools (for example heading styles <h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, <h3></h3>; paragraph style <p></p>, list style <li></li> if in html editing mode). 
• If you have written your content in Word and want to import it into Moodle Book, you can do this if you have applied heading and paragraph styles consistently in Word. See OLCreate: Adding Resources: Importing from Microsoft Word | OLCreate (open.edu) for guidance.
• Ensure all tables are html tables which use the html styles and keep the tables simple. It is better to have a series of simple tables which explain how information and ideas are organised, than one large complicated table which could hinder interpretation and not display well, especially on a small screen if the learner is accessing your resource via a mobile device. Avoid inserting tables as images, because this will be unreadable to screen reader software, and difficult to describe in an image long description.

Video and Audio accessibility

Transcripts, captions and subtitles make video and audio files more accessible to people with visual and hearing impairments. See embedding a video, adding an audio file and adding a transcript. Video editing software has the functionality to add subtitles and captions. These should also be included in the transcript.

Video and audio files with music soundtrack playing while a voice is speaking may not be accessible for those with hearing impairments, it is harder to absorb spoken information through a continuous musical soundtrack, especially if the music is loud. Therefore, if you add it, use background music sparingly so it enhances rather than overwhelms the message being conveyed.

Testing accessibility

It is advisable to test your resource is accessible before you attempt to publish it. This platform has a publication authorisation stage, and we will not publish resources which are not accessible.

7. Assessment and rewards

You may decide that you want learners to enrol on your course and work through assessment activities to earn a statement of participation / custom Moodle certificate and / or a course badge.

OpenLearn Create has the functionality to support open badges. You will need to work out what the assessment criteria will be for your course badge, complete the project request form and email it to openlearncreate@open.ac.uk so the OpenLearn Create team can review it and discuss your course with you. Subsequently you will need to design your badge, then complete and submit a badge details form which will be sent to you once your badge request has been reviewed.