Thursday, October 14, 2010

Open University Open Access Courses

The UK's Open University is now providing online course materials under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. This allows the material to be used for free, changed and the changes distributed, as long as the original author is acknowledged and copies are not sold.

The OU's materials look comfortably familiar. As an example for "Environmental factors and organisations", a 6 hour course, with about ten pages of notes. As well as bring provided as a set of web pages formatted like an electronic book, there is also a printable version of the notes, all on one web page.

OU appear to be using Moodle 2 and perhaps the Moodle Book module, to produce these notes. This is similar to the book format I use for my Green ICT course. The quantity of notes OU is providing is similar to that for my course (about 1.5 pages of notes per hour of course).

Unfortunately I was unable to see what the actual OU Moodle based courses look like, as when I attempt to register I get: "Unable to process your request at the moment, please try again later.". Perhaps OU need to carry out some optimisations of their Moodle system (a few tweaks can make the system much more efficient).

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