During the month of June I’ll be participating in an open online course on using WordPress as a platform for teaching and learning. More broadly, the four-week course will function as a community of learners exploring topics and issues such as:
- open education, open pedagogy and design
- WordPress as a highly customizable framework for teaching and learning
- examples of instructors and learners usng WordPress sites in many different ways for multiple purposes
- plug ins, applications and approaches for creating, discussing, sharing and interacting with each other
I’ll be using this course as a vehicle to further develop and enhance a WordPress based course I’m teaching this summer at Austin College, “How the Web Works: Building Your Digital Identity, Literacy, and Network.” Beyond that, I’m looking forward to participating with colleagues to build up a rich set of resources that we can then make available to folks here at AC who want to move their teaching and learning in a more open and connected direction.
According to the course facilitators at the University of British Columbia,
Teaching with WordPress is designed to be a “connectivist” open online course, in which the contributions of the participants are crucial to what each of us learns; we will connect with each other through blog posts, Twitter and discussions on this site. Most importantly, we’ll learn from each other’s course design on their WordPress sites. It is our hope that at least some of the connections participants make with each other in the course will last beyond the course itself, that we can develop a kind of community of practice around teaching with WordPress (and/or around open education & open pedagogy, or anything else that comes up in the course).
I know it’s late notice, but if any of you want to join in, that would be great…all you need is a WordPress site and a course that you would like to work on. Or just follow along at the Twitter hashtag #TWP15.
