Institutes
Guidelines and specifications
Texts and guidelines
Further guidance is provided to assist institutes in supporting instructors throughout the overall process of creation and development of open courses. In brief:
- Draft text on technical specifications for the required audiovisual equipment and software
- Instructional design for the provided Open Courses
- Short and extended guidelines on the intellectual property management
- Short and extended guidelines for developing educational material of various types (PowerPoint, Word, Open Office, pdf) that meet the standards of accessibility for people with disabilities
Specifications of open courses
Extended text on Open Courses’ specifications has been provided to partner institutes. Briefly:
- Each Open Course should cover 100% of the course curriculum, provide an analytical description of its subject and goals, and contain both keywords and course terminology
- Organizing the educational material in units / lecture modules is obligatory. A learning path, that learners should follow, might also be defined
- Each module must contain a description of goals, keywords, notes, presentation slides and other supporting material. Online exercises or quizzes could also be provided, taking benefit of the Open eClass platform affordances
- Instructors are suggested to use as far as possible digital sources that are available in institutes online libraries
- Open Courses of A+ category should contain multimedia material, such as video lectures, synchronized videos to presentation slides, podcasting, multimedia presentations, interactive content etc
- Open Courses can be characterized as A+ only if the multimedia material provided corresponds to the 80% of the curriculum
Especially concerning video lectures:
- They should contain a brief description and presentation slides (if used) and they should be classified in chronological order, in order to consist a video-course
- They should be synchronized to presentation slides, allowing learners to choose specific parts of the lecture to watch. In cases that whiteboards or blackboards are used, educational content (texts, figures, equations, etc.) should be clearly visible. Thus, high definition recording is suggested (at least 720p)
- Each video lecture should contain metadata which must also meet technical specifications defined
How to create your own open courses:
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
- “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
- “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.
