Pre-course announcement

#OCL4Ed (2014.02)

Another free professional development opportunity from the OERu
5 - 19 February 2014

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The UNESCO-COL OER Chair network and the OERu welcomes you to the Open Content Licensing for Educators (OCL4Ed 14.02) micro Open Online Course which starts on 5 February 2014.

This is a pre-course announcement to help you get started.

Before starting the course, we recommend that you familiarise yourself with the learning environment and layout of the course by visiting the course dashboard. We recommend that participants have a Twitter account and a personal blog site to support your learning on this course (see instructions below).

This is an open online course. The course materials are hosted on WikiEducator. Interactions and discussions are distributed across the Internet using microblog notes, blog posts and a Google+ Community forum (see instructions below).

If this is your first course with OERu, please help us an take a few minutes to complete the new participant survey

Please share the gift of knowledge and invite colleagues and friends to join us. Hundreds of participants from almost 50 different countries are already registered for OCL4Ed 14.02. When inviting colleagues, remember to include a link to the course homepage: http://wikieducator.org/OCL4Ed.

I look forward to meeting you during OCL4Ed 14.02!

With kind regards
Wayne Mackintosh
UNESCO-COL Chair in OER

Instructions to get started

Five things you can do before starting the #OCL4Ed workshop

Bookmark the OCL4Ed course dashboard in your browser. If you are unfamiliar with navigating a wiki, you can bookmark this version of the dashboard which removes the normal wiki navigation. The course dashboard contains all the links to the course materials, copies of the emails for course instructions and the aggregated course feed. Create a Twitter account if you don't have one and test a post using WikiEducator WENotes. Create a free personal blog for the course, login to WikiEducator and register the URL of the blog you will be using for the course. Declare yourself by posting an introduction on your course blog. Work through the Course guide.

General course information

1. This is an asynchronous course divided into 5 sessions. You should aim to spend approximately 1 to 1.5 hours per session at times which suite your own schedule. We have allocated 2 working days for each session in OCL4Ed.
2. The course materials are designed for guided self-study with opportunities for peer-support from your facilitators and fellow participants using microblog and discussion forum posts.
3. At the start of each session, your facilitators will post a preview of the session's activities for the 2 days allocated for each session. (Remember that we are working across 24 time zones, so you may receive your instructions a little ahead of your own time zone. You should participate according to the dates in your local time zone.)
4. Our free online courses usually attract hundreds of participants worldwide. Meet new friends and share your experiences. You will get the most from this course by sharing your thoughts, ideas and experiences with fellow participants using microblog notes and posts to the discussion forums on Google + (you will need a gmail account).
5. We provide an aggregated feed of #OCL4Ed posts from Twitter, WikiEducator notes and blog posts which you can also access from the Course Dashboard.
6. The course tag for Twitter and Blog posts is: #OCL4Ed (You must add this tag to your posts which is used to harvest your contributions in the aggregated feed.)