Sharing together

dScribe is fundamentally about the opportunity to collaborate with others to create and share open content. Perhaps you’re a group of students creating a project and want to ensure that others can take your work and adapt it. Or, maybe you’re a faculty member looking for students and staff to work with you as you strive to open your research and teaching material to a broader audience.

* Case study

At Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), the introduction of Open Educational Resources (OER) has resulted in collaborative effort among stakeholders in creating quality educational resources for teaching, learning and research. Among the challenges confronting the creation of electronic learning materials such as OER is the heavy demand on faculty time. In order to address this, KNUST has embraced the idea of student teams working with faculty to co-develop resources with the collaborative aim of supporting OER production. In particular, we have included students from the Department of Communication Design (DeCoDe) within the College of Art & Social Sciences in our OER production. We have matched a health instructor with an OER media specialist (a KNUST non-teaching staff member who is a recent DeCoDe alumnus or alumna) and a team of DeCoDe students to assist with putting the content into an electronic learning resource.

Creating OER, or any teaching and learning material for that matter, requires considerable time commitment. KNUST’s experience has shown that with the help of students, that amount of time can be minimized and help attract more content providers to share their work as OER.

:: Adapted from Benjamin Prempeh's article. CC BY :: Read more

Deciding on a process

As you confirm who you will work with, you'll begin to formulate thoughts around how you want to collaborate to create and publish OER. A few things to think about are how you'll communicate, what tools you'll use to build content, and how open you'll be about sharing your process with others. You have a couple of approaches you can take:

• DIY and simply have fun exploring the process of creating open content.

• Use an existing process (either model your work after something or join a group already creating OER -- post a comment in the discussion to see if someone has a few tips).

The University of Michigan developed a particular way to collaborate between staff, students, and faculty. Below is an illustration of the process -- just an idea to get you thinking of how you can work with others.

* Tool tips

There are nearly three and a half bazillion collaboration tools and open communities for you to sink your teeth into. Here are some of our favorites (post your own favs in the discussion):

Collab tools

• Google Drive (docs, spreadsheets and presentations)

• DropBox (files of all shapes and sizes)

• OpenEtherPad (collaborative editing)

• P2PU (course building)

• Trello (project and task managing)

• GitHub (software developing)

Communities (aka, Peoples)

• P2PU (learning enthusiasts)

• ccMixter (music remixers)

• subreddits (something you care about exists, trust us)

• students for free culture (free culture community)

• P2PU mentorship program (1:1 mentoring, or 1:many)

• Meetup (local groups)

• email someone (don't forget the simple solutions: just talk with someone you know)

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What do you know?

Do you have experience with any of these tools or communities? Do you have questions about these tools or communities? Let's chat about them in the Discussion.