The Empowered Digital Teacher for Online Learning (EDT4OL) course requires a high level of technology support from the facilitator. For this reason, each cohort offering will be restricted to a maximum of thirty (30) participants.

We want to ensure that students who gain entry into the course have the digital skills they’ll need to succeed, and this will be determined through submission of an online acceptance portfolio. You will be able to acquire these skills by working through the independent study materials in this learning pathway.

Places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis determined by the date and time of the submission of your final application portfolio. In the event that the course is over-subscribed – that is, exceeding 30 participants – successful portfolio candidates will be added to a waiting list for preferential access when the next cohort of the course is offered.

Given the time commitment required to master these skills, students are required to sign a learning contract specifying the actions that learners promise to undertake to achieve success and the support that the facilitator will provide to help you succeed.

The OER Foundation will provide free access to the online software services needed for the duration of the course including:

1. A personal blog site using WordPress (A backup file of your blog portfolio will be provided in the event that you wish to create your own blog site in the future.)
2. Free access to WikiEducator, used for collaborative authoring of online content
3. A course website using WordPress to publish online course materials and to author H5P interactive objects.

Prerequisite knowledge

Entry to this course requires submission of an acceptance portfolio providing evidence of:

1. Digital skills using open educational resources (OER) as demonstrated by:
   • Achieving the Certificate of Completion for the Digital Skills for OER Sharing (DS4OERS) course, or
   • Completing two of the DS4OERS digital badges prior to submitting the application portfolio below.
2. Current knowledge of basic concepts in copyright and open licensing by passing a short online test (20 questions).
3. Your ability to:
   • Apply semantic markup in the form of basic wiki text. Semantic markup is an important digital skill which separates formatting (e.g. headings, bold, italics, lists etc.) from the content using designated characters without the use of rich text editors.
   • Publish content online in the form of a personal blog post. Developing online learning materials requires an understanding of server-based technology, as opposed to editing documents locally using word processor software.

A four-step submission process

Your acceptance portfolio will be submitted and marked through a learning management system called ‘Moodle’. The OER Foundation has donated use of the OERu’s Moodle site for the purpose of this course.

Before you start, please enrol on the EDT4OL Moodle Acceptance portfolio page, so that you can upload your evidence. (You will need to register an account on the OERu Moodle site if you don’t already have one.)

Timeline and due dates