Saide has published a Course Design and Materials Development Guide, aimed at supporting education practitioners to design and develop high quality teaching and learning materials to support learner success. It is published on the Saide website as an Open Educational Resource (OER) under a Creative Commons licence. Sheila Drew elaborates on the purpose of the guide.
The Design Guide is based on key principles of open learning that Saide has developed and refined over time. Open learning is an approach to all education that enables as many people as possible to take advantage of affordable and meaningful educational opportunities throughout their lives through: sharing expertise, knowledge, and resources; reducing barriers and increasing access; and acknowledging diversity of context.
Key open learning principles include:
- Learners are provided with opportunities and capacity for lifelong learning;
- Learning processes centre on the learners and the contexts of learning, build on their experience and encourage active engagement
leading to independent and critical thinking;
- Learning provision is flexible, allowing learners to increasingly determine where, when, what and how they learn, as well as the pace at which they will learn;
- Prior learning and experience is recognised wherever possible; arrangements for credit transfer and articulation between qualifications facilitate further learning; and, most importantly,
- Providers create the conditions for a fair chance of learner success through learner support, contextually appropriate resources and sound pedagogical practices.
As one of the co-authors of the Design Guide commented, developing this guide really taught us the meaning of the word iterative. In fact round and round may be a more appropriate description of the process than backwards and forwards. To a certain degree this was because we had set ourselves the challenge of applying the open learning principles to design and development in any mode of delivery. We did this because we are aware that in African contexts the distance education or distributed learning is not exclusively associated with the use of technology e-learning/online learning and distance education.
In the Introduction section called ‘ Open Learning ' we have posted a discussion document called ‘Considering mode of delivery in education', which considers questions about the mode of delivery. You might find it interesting to read. Now that you have clicked your way into the Design Guide, have a look around. We hope you find it interesting.
But producing the Design Guide was also iterative because, while there were some key authors, we decided to involve as many of the Saide education staff as possible. We tried to treat this as an organizational learning process as well as a publication. A number of staff workshops and feedback sessions helped us to identify gaps, raise numerous questions and in many cases to find answers.
The Design Guide is based on five fundamental questions:
- Where do we start?
- What do learners need to learn?
- How can we help learners learn?
- How will we know learners have learned?
- How can we be sure of good quality learning?
In order to try and answer these questions we focused on key issues that we think are central in any course and materials design and development, namely planning, content, context, learner support, structure, learning/pedagogy, assessment and resources. Your navigation through the site is based on these five questions, though we suspect, and hope, that you will find yourself moving backwards and forwards between them. You may know from your own experience that a project like this is never really finished. So while what we have published is, we believe, a comprehensive resource, we do intend to come back to it again often, to keep it current and meaningful.
In the spirit of open learning we hope that you learn from it, and that we learn from it too through your feedback.
|
