The Open Education Challenge series originally ran in Fall 2020 (and all the information here is from that first offering – the challenge series has since been slightly modified and updated). Here’s how they did it – and how you can run your own challenge series:
- The Open Education Challenge Series builds on other ventures into micro-learning such as the UDG Agora and the DS106 assignment bank.
- Recognizing that the average North American employee has 24 minutes or less for professional development per week, and that higher ed faculty in the midst of COVID pivots likely have much less, it aimed to generate awareness and some application of concepts of open education in 20 minutes or less per week.
- The series was designed to be email-based professional development, inspired by the popularity of mailing-list based training. programs outside of higher education. We recognized that we needed a friction-free way of getting the challenges and communication in front of a busy audience, and believe that email is a well-understood way of doing this.
- The survey forms were created using Gravity Forms within WordPress
- Jessica Weber of Star Graphic Design did all of the graphics for the website, and established the look and feel for both the website and the email templates.
- BCcampus generously sponsored prizes, and we used Massy Books and Promosapien as our suppliers.
The Open Education Challenge Series is licensed for adaptation and reuse with a CC BY license.
If you found it helpful and want to adapt it, here’s what you can do:
- We used MailChimp as our primary delivery platform for this series, but all of the challenges and recaps that were communicated via Mailchimp are on this website and can be cut and pasted into a new format or mode of delivery. You can sort them using the Challenge category and the Recap category.
- Alternatively, f you are a member of a BC post-secondary institution, you can set up a wordpress space on OpenETC and with one click you can clone the OE Challenge website. Once you’ve cloned it, you can make changes and edits as you like.
- The video walkthroughs are hosted on the BCcampus Kaltura site and can be linked to or downloaded
If you decide to reuse it, we’d appreciate it if you let us know in the comments below. We are interested in the practicalities of reuse more generally, adaptations that are needed, and the impact of this kind of sharing more broadly.
Thank you!
Tannis and Leva
