Since I am interested in Open Courseware and the long-term benefits of open materials to society, I am teaching my courses this semester in a semi-public manner – I am trying to think of my materials as “open first” or “public first”.
I will protect only those materials and information that I feel need protecting.
Using Sakai as my LMS system has been great because it has a lot of features that allow me to remix my own content in Sakai. Frankly over the past few years features and capabilities have been added from many of the Sakai developers that make this fun.
What is amazing to me is how much of this I can already do with Sakai – just knowing the ins and outs of Sakai’s features – of course it does not hurt that I was part of adding these features into Sakai over the past few years.
It also helps to have spent a bunch of time talking to folks at Cambridge, Oxford, and Leeds to understand the “more open” approach to teaching that is present in the UK. (Video)
If you are interested in taking a look at my semi-public site – go to www.si182.com
In the rest of the blog post, I outline some of the things I have done.