Set Them Free! Open Publishing of INF1B Course Materials

School:  Informatics

Team Members:  Vidminas Vizgirda, Fiona McNeill, Brian Mitchell

Abstract

With this project, we want to assemble a team, including a panel of students, to revise materials that have accumulated over a decade in our course, Informatics 1: Object-Oriented Programming (“INF1B”). Our goal is to improve the materials’ presentation and accessibility and enable access for the wider public by hosting them on a public-access website, available under a CC-BY-SA open license. By doing this, we can encourage other courses to follow our lead and offer help and advice in doing so. The Open Educational Resources movement highlights many benefits of making learning materials public, notably: avoiding re-inventing the wheel between courses with common goals; raising the profile of our university, staff, and students; and enhancing teaching and learning.

This project will bring us a step closer to our new course assessment strategy, in which students will co-create course materials and share them openly. There is strong pedagogical research advocating this approach and it is essential in a programming course like ours, where jobs demand applicants to demonstrate tangible evidence of experience with programming and documentation writing.