Students Fasi Moi Afi school.jpg


The Digital skills for OER sharing (DS4OERS) course has implemented an activity-based design.

Learn by doing

The course is made up of a series of learning challenges where you will create resources for use in the classroom. In this way, your time is spent productively, producing resources for your own use while also refining your digital skills. More importantly, as OER, you are making a positive contribution to your community by sharing these resources to help others. Hopefully, you will find valuable materials that others have created for your own teaching that are shared in the online repository. As OER, you will have the freedom to adapt, refine, and improve the materials for everyone.

Each of the challenges in this short course is a building block to completing the final ‘capstone’ project. There, you will develop a lesson plan that incorporates three teaching resources you generate as you work through the course. Choose a lesson in a subject area of your choice, and then focus the development of the individual resources for the individual challenges to incorporate into this lesson.

The learning challenges increase in complexity with reference to the digital skills required for completing the challenge.

We have two categories of learning challenges in this course:

  1. Enabler challenges which focus on the the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of Open Educational Resources (OER) – this is pre-requisite knowledge for the remaining challenges.
  2. Digital skills challenges providing hands-on experience in developing OER using Free and Open Source Software tools.

Overview of the enabler learning challenges

We begin our learning journey with a reflection on why we teach, and how principles of openness are aligned with the values and purpose of education. We will provide a short overview of what makes an OER, and a summary of how copyright works, the Creative Commons suite of open licences, and the compatibility among open licences when re-mixing materials. The enabler challenges are guided by three questions. Click on the corresponding information (“i”) buttons for each question for an overview, links to course materials, and the associated learning challenge.

Overview of the digital skills learning challenges

Before you start your learning journey, spend 5 to 10 minutes consulting the staircase of the hands-on, digital skills challenges below. Click on the corresponding information (“i”) buttons for each challenge to find more information on the task, and examples and links to the relevant sections in the course materials.