Pilot Course Overview

Brief Course Overview

The course “Open Education: fundamentals and approaches. A learning journey opening up teaching in higher education”, aims to build capacity on Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER) among universities in the South Mediterranean region.

The course targets primarily university teachers with an interest in learning more about Open Education and with a motivation to adopt Open Education approaches and OER into their teaching.

Key learning outcomes

After having taken this course, learners will be able to:

  • Understand the potential advantages of adopting OER and open education approaches in different contexts
  • Understand how content released under different kinds of open licences can be reused and apply open licenses to your content
  • Search for, reuse and remix OER
  • Understand what MOOCs are and how to produce MOOCs
  • Adapt OER and MOOCs to your specific context.
  • Incorporate open educational practices into your daily teaching.

Course approach and phases

The course takes an active learning approach, where online learning is complemented by a number of activities and by an intense hands-on project work, and is composed of three phases:

Phase 1: One week of face-to-face training in Torino, Italy, gathering the learners participating in the pilot phase of the course.

Phase 2: An online learning phase, during which learners are expected to take the course modules and to complete the activities proposed.

This phase will be run through Local Learning Circles, meaning groups of learners that will meet face to face to collaboratively run the online course and activities, that will be established in all the participating universities. Each Learning Circle will be coordinated by one or two Local Facilitators, who will be in charge of organising meetings, supporting learners, assessing activities, and report back to the group. Each Learning Circle will rely on the Innovation Centers on Open Education (ICOEs) established by the OpenMed project in the participating universities.

This phase will require 40 hours of work.

Phase 3: A project work phase (January-February 2018), during which learners are expected to use the skills they have acquired to develop their “project work” aiming at “opening up their teaching”. The project work will build upon five steps, that will be taken at the end of each module:

  • Step 1. Make a pledge for opening up your course/teaching
  • Step 2. Identify open licences that you will apply to your teaching/course
  • Step 3. Use OER in your teaching/course
  • Step 4. Localise OER to your course/context
  • Step 5. Develop an open teaching plan and share it with the community

Project works will be evaluated by the local facilitators and can be collaborative. Project works will start in Torino with the help of Facilitators and OpenMed staff.

This phase will require 40 hours of work.

Modules

The training programme will cover five modules, running between September 2017-March 2018:

  • Module 1. Introducing Openness in Education
  • Module 2. Open Licensing and Copyright
  • Module 3. Creating and reusing OER
  • Module 4. Localising OER and MOOCs
  • Module 5. Open Educational Practices

The materials that will be used as part of the course are available for revision through this platform we have launched to gather feedback: https://coursecomments.openmedproject.eu

Key dates

  • September 25-29, 2017, kick-off Open Education Training Week at Politecnico di Torino, to be followed by an online training phase from October 2017 to March 2018
  • October 2017: Modules 1 & 2, two related webinars, and attendance encouraged at local workshops
  • November 2017: Modules 3 & 4, two related webinars, then local mid-course workshops encouraged at local level
  • December 2017: Module 5 and related workshop
  • January-February 2018: learners can concentrate on finalising project work

Intro video (in English)

Intro video (in Arabic)