Developing Short Open Access Courses for the Hub

One of my projects within the Hub is to support the development of high quality, interdisciplinary and innovative short open access (OA)courses for healthcare professionals as well as the wider public with a general interest in healthcare. OA in itself is a broad topic but in general, terms can be summarised as content that is ‘digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions’. OA content can take many different forms ranging anywhere from a MOOC, to fully open course materials published on the web. In terms of the Hub, the main aim of the OA project is to promote teaching and research across disciplines for population health benefit through data sciences, as well as making high-quality learning materials available to a wide audience. This short blog post looks at how the project has developed over the last few months.

At the start of this project, I spent some time looking at the different requirements and considerations for developing OA courses. I noted down all the different things that needed to be considered and then split them into what was essential for the project and what would be desirable. This helped guide the decision of what platform to use (Canvas), as well as the technology and pedagogy choices during the design period of the project.

We also conducted a short survey of current distance learning students to understand their expectations and experiences of short OA courses. We found that almost everyone (87%) has accessed a short OA course before. 78% of students wanted to sign up for an OA course to be able to participate in online activities, track completion and get a certificate of their learning, and the ideal length of time of a short OA course is 1–3 hours (60%). When students were asked what they expected from an OA course (free text answer) they said they wanted a course that was:

• Relevant to their own professional development (e.g. certificate of completion, skills, CPD)
• Well-designed (a good introduction to a subject with ‘stretch’ materials)
• Accessible (flexible learning, available 24/7)

Once the requirements of the project had been understood, I designed two documents to help guide the design process.

The first document (OA_01) focuses on the high-level overview of the course (title, course description, topics and learning outcomes (LOs)) and then expands on the overview details by topic (listing the resources and activities for each topic) as well as mapping the topics against the LOs. The reuse of existing materials is encouraged and a fully developed OA course also has the potential to be reused in other courses and could also be the first topic of an online CPD course in the same topic or subject.

The second document (OA_02) expands on the work done in the first document and breaks down the content into individual items. This document is the master copy for the development stage and the more detailed the storyboard, the easier the development and build will be.

In May 2019, we ran our first storyboarding workshop for developing short open access courses. The workshop took place over an afternoon with 4 academics from the Hub across both divisions. The workshop started with a short introduction to the purpose and pedagogy of designing and developing short OA courses. We then had a group activity where each academic shared the overview of their course with the rest of the group. This was useful in identifying any overlaps, the potential for collaboration and the use of reusable learning objects. We then discussed the different tools that can be used to build OA materials and looked at some examples and good practice. The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to giving time to the academics to complete their storyboarding document. Once the documents have been completed I can then create an outline of the course in Canvas to collaboratively develop the course with the academic.

As a result of the workshop, we now have 5 short OA courses in the pipeline. We will be running further storyboarding workshops for academics who will be developing short open access courses in the future. Contact the Hub via i3hs@manchester.ac.uk for more details or to get involved.