Open Access Courses in an E-Learning Process: Lessons from a Pilot Case Study

Abstract

Learning, in terms of academic or scholar education, used to be a privilege for few. Nowadays, with the use of new technologies and under the changing demographics in education, even higher academic knowledge can be acquired from people leaving in the most remote places at their convenience. In this paper we exemplify how Open Courses (OCs) in terms of Open Educational Resourses (OERs) can assist the process of e-learning in university level, especially that of autonomous and asynchronous.. We present the lessons learned from the Open Academic Courses of the Agricultural University of Athens (AUA) in Hellas experimental pilot case. We review the project’s progress so far, the challenges of converting traditional courses into OCs, the technologies used and the steps that were followed in order to ensure, intellectual property, accessibility and openness of the content. Furthermore we present future work, which includes a survey amongst tutors for the evaluation of such OERs and of the used methods. Open Academic Courses of the AUA is a project part of a major program for converting the Hellenic University's courses into OCs. Lectures converted to open courses (type A-,A and A+ according to the percentage and type of multimedia used) are hosted in the project’s preliminary platform and are being implemented to both the University’s portal, Open eClass and OpenDelos platforms, and the national repository for OCs. Project’s target group includes academia, graduates, people with special needs, professionals and individuals as well as local authorities.

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Author Information
Kyvelle Constantina Diareme, Agricultural University of Athens, Greece
Maria Dimitra Papoulia, Agricultural University of Athens, Greece
Theodore Tsiligiridis, Agricultural University of Athens, Greece

• Category: Open and Distance Learning Technologies

Posted by James Alexander Gordon

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