Friday 25 March 2016

2 Worthwhile courses: Personal Learning & Designing OER using practical instructional design

Two free courses that have started a while ago, but that are truly worth taking a look at.

  1. Instructional Design Service Course: designing OER while using practical instructional design
  2. Personal Learning (course built by Stephen Downes) using LPSS

Instructional Design Service Course
My colleague Johan Thys just sent me a link to a wonderful self-guided, instructor-driven online course on designing courses via a project-based approach. The course uses the CANVAS-platform and demands 2-3 hours of study time per week, and has a great course design template, uses practical frameworks (e.g. Merrill's first principles of instruction) and offers the participants a chance to make their projects (courses) available afterwards as OER.

"During this 12-week course, you will engage in a real-world authentic instructional design challenge that centers on the design and development of free open educational resources (OER) for adult basic education. This open service-learning course is facilitated by Designers for Learning (Links to an external site.), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in the United States. We coordinate service-learning opportunities with those who seek to gain experience creating instruction and other types of performance improvement solutions to support important social causes. In this project-based course, you will gain instructional design experience while developing instructional materials that will be made available for free to adult educators and their learners in the Adult Learning Zone group on OER Commons """""(Links to an external site.). "

OpenEdX course by Stephen Downes on Personal Learning 

This course explores the topic of learning in three ways: first, through an examination of research and development issues related to the topic; second, through interaction with a personal learning environment (specifically: LPSS) to take the course; and third, through activities supporting the development of a personal learning environment at a conceptual level. A quick overview of the themes per week can be seen here.

Course objectives: participants will develop an appreciation of different models of online course delivery, ranging from the traditional LMS through connectivist MOOCs to potential future models of personal learning and performance support.

Course environment: NRC01 Personal Learning will be delivered using OpenEdX and will include text-based content, videos, discussion, and exercises. Participants will be also invited to explore additional learning environments, including the gRSShopper, LPSS.me and Arke prototypes developed by NRC. In addition, participants will be encouraged to explore and work in online environments related to the topics covered in the course and report their findings in the discussion area or their own website. Participants may also be subscribed to a daily newsletter for the duration of the course.

Course Tag: #NRC01PL
Course Registration: https://openedx.lpss.me