Motivation/Why are we here?#
What if your educational resources didn’t just teach today’s students, but were accessible, citable, and reproducible for future generations? Sounds good? Then keep listening.
Since the beginning of the replication crisis at the latest, many universities have been striving to make research more open, inclusive, and FAIR. However, the traditional means of education (Moodle, OLAT, IlIAS, etc.) have significant limitations and stand in contrast to the goals of open and FAIR science. These proprietary means have several shortcomings, such as limited access, high costs, and lack of interoperability. For example, instructors may have to purchase expensive licenses for proprietary software, limiting their ability to create and share content freely. Additionally, proprietary software often locks users into a specific ecosystem, making it challenging to collaborate with others who use different tools or platforms. These limitations hinder the collaborative and adaptive learning experience that is critical for the modern world’s educational needs.
What are the main problems with such an approach?#
Content is exclusive in that it is only accessible to a privileged subgroup of students
Collaboration on learning content is limited
The learning content is difficult to cite
Learning content may have to be compiled anew for each cohort
It can be cumbersome to integrate interactive elements
As content is shared in cohort-specific groups, you may lose track of your content.
What can we do to create learning materials that are interactive and public? Open Educational Resources! But how?
Our approach:#
We work with the open source tools Jupyter Books and GitHub, as well as GitHub Pages, to facilitate the creation of open and reusable educational resources.
What are GitHub, GitHub and Jupyter Notebooks and why should I follow your approach exactly?#
Don’t worry if you don’t know these tools yet. That should change in the next 90 minutes (otherwise we would do a bad job). We have created a template that makes it easier for you to create open educational resources (OER) with the tools mentioned and that you can use for the creation of various learning content but also for living publication/documentation (for an example, click here. Our approach also offers a possible solution to the problems just mentioned:
Content is inclusive and accessible to anyone with a stable internet connection anywhere in the world, regardless of degree program, university, etc.
Collaboration on learning content is made much easier with GitHub
educational resources are easily citable
Learning content can be reused, but can also be easily adapted
Version control also makes older versions of the content accessible, which increases transparency
The use of Jupyter Notebook makes it easy to integrate interactive elements (live coding, videos, presentations, etc.)
By integrating the OER on your GitHub account, you can keep track of the learning content you have created
As you can see, this is much more compatible with the goals of open science and FAIR research.
How do we proceed?#
Introduction in Jupyter Books and GitHub pages.
What is possible
How is the whole thing structured?
Practical guide
Set up your own website with our template
summary
Discussion
What should have changed by the end of this course?#
it’s also called learning objectives, I know
Jupyter Notebooks /Books
Understand the concept
Know how to work with it
GitHub
Have your own account
Be able to perform basic GitHub operations (cloning, forking etc.)
Github pages
know why it is useful
understand why using these tools facilitates the creation of OER
understand why you should make the effort to work with these tools and create and share OER
Where is everything?#
All course materials will be available on this very course website. Everything will be completely open and free to use, thus constituting an open educational resource. You are free to explore, enhance, and share. Thus, this website and all materials will also remain up ideally to the end of the internet but will possibly be subject to changes and updates. If you feel the need to save this resource as it is at the moment you’re reading this, you can download the complete course from our GitHub repo here. The usage of this resource and the materials therein will be explained at the beginning and throughout the course.
We will also be providing a course template that will serve as a tool for our practical examples and can be downloaded here. The template contains a folder structure, some example content files, a license, an open science statement, an equity, diversity, and inclusion statement, as well as a code of conduct for your course. This template is supposed to be used as a starting point to generate your own course. Simply add your content or adapt the preexisting resources, adapt the structure to your liking, and upload the whole thing into an online GitHub repository, and your course website will be created automatically.