Instructors

Specifications of Open Courses

Based on their educational content, the open courses are classified in three different categories:

A- courses: provide the learner with course description and goals, keywords and glossary terms, educational material organized in course units, notes or/ and presentation slides, bibliography
A courses: in addition to A- provide podcasts synced to presentation slides
A+ courses: in addition to A- provide exercises and quizzes, digital resources and multimedia educational material

Please note that only A+ courses include videolectures as part of the educational material.

The following table shows the minimum specifications required per open course category:

How to create your own Open Course

Four Open Courses have been developed and provided to instructors and partner institutes, through the opencourses.gunet.gr. In these courses, instructions and specifications are offered regarding: a) the development process of open digital courses, b) the management of intellectual property issues, c) the search and use of Open Educational Resources, and d) the accessibility of the educational material from people with disabilities.
Teaching and research staff members involved could be interested mainly in:

“Specifications and Οpen Courses Development Process”: focusing on the standards and the suggested development process of open digital courses, including texts, video and training slides, analytical development course guide, notes and presentations.
“Intellectual Property and Open Courses – Open Educational Resources”: presenting the Creative Commons (CC) open license and general intellectual property issues, focusing on practical matters.

“Instructions for developing educational material accessible to people with disabilities”: including lectures on accessibility and guidelines for creating accessible educational material with the use of computer softwares LibreOffice 4.0, LaTex and MS-Office 2007, 2010, 2013.

In the case that instructors are interested in technical issues, they can also follow the course “Developing Open Digital Courses – Technical Issues”, which addresses mainly to staff of technical support, but also to everyone who is involved in the development process of open digital courses.

Open content communities

A service, available at communities.opencourses.gr, has been developed and is provided to enhance and support the communication and cooperation between open content creators, intended both to support them in seeking sources of Open Educational Resources and to facilitate the exchange of information, ideas and expertise among them.

The open content communities are classified per subject: