Open Platforms
Open education elsewhere
Distinction between "OpenCourseWare" and being open...
Some UBC Course Examples
Open platforms in the Masters of Educational Technology
- Teaching a course using WordPress - ETEC522: Ventures in Elearning
- Collaborative Knowledge Building in MediaWiki - ETEC510: The Design of Technology-supported Learning Environments
- Community Weblog/Wiki Authoring Spaces + WebCT for course discussions - ETEC540: Text Technology: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing
Student and Course management issues and opportunities with open platforms and social media
- What are we building here anyway? Planning for single or multi-year community sites.
- Managing student interactions - coherence, communication channels and information overload
- Negotiating public and private learning spaces
- It's about the learning, not the technology...
More on UBC Blogs
- Distributed course blogs: http://blogs.ubc.ca/span365/
- Notable blogs featured on home page of the site
- Sites such as: http://blogs.ubc.ca/blogsquad/, http://leap.ubc.ca, http://celc.sites.olt.ubc.ca/, http://chcm.ubc.ca/, http://beta.earlylearning.ubc.ca/, http://act.elearning.ubc.ca/
Blog features
Mostly developed by wider WordPress community, but at least some bits of custom code
- CWL authentication
- privacy controls for public, CWL-holders, or registered users (visibility and comments)
- add users via widget or via custom screen
And a fairly wide array of plugins (our admin is very good at monitoring their effects on system performance)
Future direction
Integration with BuddyPress to offer groups, personal profiles, threaded discussion - like at http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/
Wiki
- CWL authentication
- Wiki Ink plugin: http://frg.sites.olt.ubc.ca/ - gets its content from this wiki
- Extensions include WikiBooks (demo)
- Namespaces for courses, documentation, etc... Along with categories. Feedback?
- "transclusion" - or chunking page content into tiny wiki bits (don't call them objects, please) example
- External wiki platforms: WikiEducator, Wikiversity, Wikipedia