Opening up EDEM630 in July 2013 with Wayne Mackintosh

Semester 2 started at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand this week and with it an amazing chance for our EDEM630 course in Change with Digital Technologies in Education to challenge ourselves to open up to new hopefully more inclusive ways of learning and teaching.

As leader of the UCan e-Learning Lab I negotiated for the university to become a founder member of OERu, which led me to volunteer this course as a contribution to our philanthropic initiative. It seems right to innovate while, at the same time, facilitating professional learning about change with digital technologies. There is a synergy and an opening up of many opportunities for both the individual participants and the organisations involved.

All the same, the changes involved in working with OER Open Educational Resources) and OERu have been far more extensive than I ever imagined!

Therefore I am very fortunate to have been able to recruit a new colleague, Dr. Wayne Mackintosh, to co-design and teach this new version of my course with me (while also enabling me to honour my commitment to lead my college for this year). Wayne is an international leader in the global movement of OER, plus an expert in many aspects including instructional design and organisational change.

I can see Wayne delightfully crafting (plus adopting and adapting) lots of pieces that are valuable to this course that will also be reusable in other offerings by the OERu and by many more in the future. And that is only one of the innovative aspects of OER that I observe as we collaborate.

I am also delighted to see the leading students jump in and openly share their Blogs - others may find that a greater challenge and need some support from us all to take this leap into more open and public learning and teaching. We are also counting on support for the leap we have taken in redesigning our course way out in the open  :)