Open CourseWare at the U of S

[social-bio] Are you teaching a class this term?  Would you consider opening some of your class resources to the public? Students thinking of taking your class next year could look up your notes to get a better idea of what to expect. People outside the university could find out more about what we do.  Your colleagues could learn more about what you do.

Using the U of S Course Tools, you can hand-pick files within your course for sharing more widely. Every course using U of S Course tools has a built-in public view. By default, the public view is very limited, and you can chose to share as many or as few files as you wish.  To learn how to share your syllabus, you can either check out this 5-minute video or view the PDF file with screenshots.  For more advanced Open CourseWare and U of S Course Tools topics, check out www.usask.ca/coursetools under the “Instructors:Help” menu.

Open CourseWare (OCW) at the U of S is distinct from the well-known MIT Open CourseWare: rather than publishing complete courses online, U of S instructors will share only a selection of files within a course, and material only stays up for one year after the end of the course.

The OCW service aims to be efficient for everyone.  As an instructor, you can use the same system for sharing files with your students and sharing files with the public.  Using university resources, OCW leverages infrastructure already in place; course names and descriptions are drawn automatically from the University Course Offerings Catalogue and connected to the U of S Course Tools system, Blackboard.  By bringing together these systems, we magnify the value of our resources and increase the number of people who benefit from them.  In addition, Open CourseWare provides a mechanism for making the course syllabus a public document for all U of S courses.

To browse through U of S Open CourseWare, go to http://ocw.usask.ca.