Be Discrete

We know that some of you out there are thinking, "I'm totally going to make a MOOC of my own."  While that is definitely encouraged, you'll likely want to consider developing smaller, individually-licensed works and then bringing them together in a collective work.  This conscious approach not only makes building OER relatively simple, it is an operating practice that falls squarely in the framework of research-based, learner-centered pedagogy.  Identify the specific outcome that you have in mind, determine what kind of material you will need to create, and then, after composing it, license it.  Even if it's just a handout containing a list of terminology (provided that the definitions are yours to license), you'll want to think of it as a thing of its own.  What follows is a brief discussion of some things to keep in mind when planning your material.  Simply put, your peers are more likely to participate in the use and adaptation of your open resource if it:

  • serves a clear and limited educational purpose,
  • is self-contained,
  • incorporates educational best practices, and
  • prominently displays its licensing and legality.

The last two will be addressed in the following pages.  For now, let's take a look at the former.

Just a Little Bit at a Time

While prepackaged, complete courses are nice for all those autodidacts out there, they aren't necessarily all that helpful as sharable materials for instructors.  The main reason here is that the variety of philosophies and content that can exist even among instructors of a single course at a single institution pretty much guarantees that one instructor's use of another instructor's entire course is unlikely.  Creating a single, massive work is not only a formidable task, it doesn't invite open sharing like the creation of smaller licensed works that break up the course into discrete chunks. 

This is one good reason to consider the course as a whole a "collective" work and home in on individual lessons and concepts when sitting down to work on developing the material.  Your peers will more easily be able to use your work as they need it, without having to rearrange their entire course.  And, to reiterate, this approach works well with learning-centered pedagogical strategies as discussed on the next page.

Everything You Need

Before we head into the incorporation of quality guidelines into the material, note that another crucial characteristic of a useable resource is that it contains everything necessary for another instructor to implement it.  For example, you won't want to create a diagnostic mechanics activity without including:

  • some instructions for how it can be used (for the instructor),
  • the activity itself, and
  • an answer key.

If you make your resource available without one of these crucial elements, an instructor wishing to use the material may find only frustration and/or confusion.  In this example, you could simply make the document three pages long so that each element could be easily separated from the other using any basic word processing software.

With a limited and self-contained project in mind, let's look at other aspects of quality and legality.