I may not have mentioned it, but I wrote a book called The Digital Scholar a few years back. It was published under a CC licence by Bloomsbury Academic. Last year a colleague of mine, Fernando Rosell, read it and suggested to the OpenLearn team that they should make a short course based on it.
The OpenLearn team have developed a format of Badged Open Courses (BOCs). These are generally 8 weeks long, 3 hours per week, with a quiz halfway through and at the end, and a digital badge available. They’re openly licensed (CC-NC – don’t go all haterz on the NC people), professionally produced and open for continual enrolment. The evidence from previous runs of BOCs has been that they tend to have a higher retention rate than normal MOOCs (there, I said the M word). Some research on demographics can be found here.
This seemed a good fit for a Digital Scholar course, which could be seen as professional development. So following on from Fernando’s suggestion, the team got in touch. The great thing was that being openly licensed, we could use the book as the basis. It needed a bit of updating, and not all of it was relevant, but it formed a good spine to a course. I wrote the first draft, and Nigel Gibson then added a layer of a guiding voice to it. We shot some (super-awkward, rabbit in headlights) videos and created the quizzes. And last week it went live. I don’t know how useful it will prove, but I’ve added it to my list of “unexpected benefits when you release something under an open licence”.
And while you’re thinking “free open courses, maybe they’ll become a thing”, you might also want to look at the Open Educator course created by my colleague Beck Pitt and the Open Education Scotland team. It would make a nice staff development double pack with the digital scholar course. I know, we spoil you.