Thompson Rivers University, a founding member of OERu, employs approximately 250 faculty to deliver about 400 online courses to 12,000 students per year. Because our faculty are geographically dispersed, we need to rely on distance technologies to provide faculty development opportunities and to build a sense of community.
TRU Open Learning's recently released series of openly licensed (CC-BY-SA) mini-courses are built to utilize the extensibility and social characteristics of WordPress as an open platform, including the experimental SPLOT tools designed by Alan Levine and Brian Lamb.
This presentation will outline the structure of the courses as well as preliminary observations of how the open content and platform affect faculty community, confidence, and capacity in teaching online. The presenters will provide an update on the first six months of participation in the courses as well as the ways in which others are exercising their 5R rights to the series.
