Practical lessons we learned and tools you can (re)use to adapt the MOOC

This is the final week of this MOOC and is our opportunity to share more about the approach we adopted in designing all the educational resources with reusers as our priority. In fact, starting on day one of this journey, we decided to experiment with radical openness, investing our time and resources in exploring a “good enough” way to share all elements of this course as editable resources, licenced appropriately to enable maximum reuse and adaptation by others.

This week, we will share the perspective of the MOOC's project manager—in this specific case, also the content expert—and the perspective of two visual editors to provide insight and suggestions about how we chose to proceed and some key choices that made it possible to share everything, even video projects with editable layers, as open resources.

We focused on:

• Open source software to encourage others to adopt, adapt, and make available with no limitations due to proprietary software;
• Open file formats that can be edited in open-source software;
• Open licences.

We had to upscale our digital skills and explore multiple solutions before choosing the ones we agreed upon.

Compromises had to be made in multiple directions, most of all from the graphic perspective. We had to exclude by default some effects that are commonly used in our MOOCs but are not available in the Open context or would have made life more difficult for reusers. Simplicity, cleanness, and ease of adaptation have been our guiding criteria.

Finally, we looked for an online repository where to upload our content to enable reusers to integrally adapt each piece of each resource, including videos. Our choice fell to Zenodo, which allowed us to upload zipped files for each lesson, including each video project, in a slightly diminished resolution to fit the purpose and respect the available GB limits. 

You can find all the MOOC resources shared in editable format here: Enhancing education through open opportunities - Massive Open Online Course materials.

Please let us know if you reuse our resources and if this process was helpful for you!

It’s been a challenging but rewarding journey. We will be ready to reuse this experience with the next radically open MOOC we produce, but what we learned from this experience also helped us improve our standard MOOC production process.

Curious to know more? Go to the next lessons!