GMCTE to Offer Intro to Learning Technologies Course Through Canvas

[social_share/] [social-bio] In the fall of 2013 I was preparing to offer a new course through the GMCTE on learning technologies for instructors at the U of S.  The cap on the course registration, given that it was a blended online and face-to-face course, was set at 15. Since we are advocates of open education at the GMCTE we decided to open up all of the resources on a WordPress site. We further decided that we would allow people to “register” for the open course to receive weekly emails and they could list their blogs to make sure that I or someone else in the GMCTE would read their weekly posts related to the course. Jim Greer dubbed our course a TOOC for Truly Open Online Course because all of the resources carry Creative Commons licenses allowing reuse and the resources remain open almost a year later on the WordPress site.

There were ten people who completed the 13-week blended version of the course while we had a total of 328 people register for the TOOC when it was first offered last January. Throughout the course, only about twenty of those people asked to be removed from the course mailing list. A program evaluation of the TOOC was completed and you can read it here.

Currently, Ryan Banow and I are revising this course to re-offer it again this coming January. While we will be teaching it again to an on-campus blended cohort, we are also offering the TOOC, this time through the Canvas open course network. Both courses will run for ten weeks and the TOOC will include discussion boards instead of blogs and, while we had three guests come in via Google Hangouts in the last offering, we are planning to have a Google Hangout for at least nine of the ten weeks this time around.

If you are a member of the faculty, staff or are a graduate student at the University of Saskatchewan you are allowed to register for the blended course or the TOOC through Canvas. If you are not any of these, you may register for the TOOC, which is free and open to anyone.