Open content licensing for educators/Course dashboard/Announcements/14.06 Session 1

=Instructions for Session 1: Why open matters=

'''You should follow the OCL4Ed course according to your own time zone. These instructions are for your Friday 20 & Monday 23 June 2014'''

Welcome to OCL4Ed 2014.06 an historic event because we are trialling a new website structure and Google Summer of Code peer evaluation prototype.

Background

The course materials for OCL4Ed were originally developed as a collaborative project by volunteers from the OER Foundation, WikiEducator, the OpenCourseWare Consortium and Creative Commons with funding support from the UNESCO Office for the Pacific States.

To the best of our knowledge, OCL4Ed was the fist comprehensive open course on OERs, copyright and Creative Commons designed for educators where all course materials were published under a Creative Commons Attribution license and developed openly as a collaborative open design project.

These open workshops are amazing international community learning events. We're privileged to be able to learn together. To date OCL4Ed has registered thousands of learners from +90 different countries. We've not advertised this iteration widely to keep numbers manageable as we are testing new features.

Orientation for new participants

If you just joined us and missed the pre-course announcement, please visit the startup page and if you are new to using social media, please work through the orientation session. If for any reason you miss any of the email announcements during the course, remember that copies are posted on the learning console. The learning console contains all the links you need for your studies and I recommend that you bookmark this page in your browser for ease of access.

Course schedule

The OCL4Ed course is divided into 5 sessions and we will allocate two working days per session. We recommend that you spend about 1 to 1.5 hours per session over the two days for each session at times which suite your own schedule.

Overview of Session 1: Why open matters in education

From the learning console you can access the course schedule which provides links to the course materials for Session 1 or you can go directly to the learning sequence from the Courseware menu link. Click through the next buttons at the bottom of the page to navigate sequentially.


 * We begin with a welcome from Stephen Downes followed by a short reflective reading on teaching as a vocation and profession. We look forward to reading your thoughts on the discussion activity task.
 * We commence our journey into open content licensing for educators by asking participants what they consider fair and reasonable practice with regards to sharing teaching materials. We will wrap up Session 1 with a reflection on the meaning of freedom in education and you will share your thoughts with the group using microblog posts.

Don't forget to share your thoughts on what permissions you deem fair and reasonable by completing the fair and reasonable practice survey. (We will share the outputs of the survey with all participants in the next few days.)

Have a great day and we look forward to seeing you online!

With kind regards

Wayne.

A few tips


 * 1) Remember all posts on Twitter and Google+ must include the tag #OCL4Ed which is needed to harvest your posts for the course feed.
 * 2) All course blogs must be registered on the course site plus you must label or tag your blog posts using the course code: OCL4Ed. (See how to add a tag in Wordpress or .) Without this information we are unable to harvest your posts for the feed. Note that it can take up to an hour before a correctly tagged blog post appears in the feed. Twitter and WikiEducator WENotes posts will appear almost in real time.