1) Brief description of your project: objectives, activities, impact

The aim of the project is to contribute to the open-education implementation of the Computing Fundamentals course. This course introduces computer programming to students with little or no computer programming expertise. The course provides basic knowledge about modern computer architectures. The course provides an overview of computer programming concepts using the C language, and gives the student the ability to write computer programs and provide adequate documentation for these programs using standard styles and structures.

The main activities of the project is to develop educational materials that cover the introductory topic of the Computing Fundamentals course. In particular, the following activities will be covered:

  • Identify the inputs, assumptions, and constraints that are related to the teaching of the course.
  • Translate the educational materials of the introductory topic into an open-education framework.
  • Provide audio recordings and coding tutorials to support the teaching of the course.
  • Develop course assessment tools to evaluate the learning outcomes.
  • Use the Canvas LMS e-learning platform to deliver the educational materials that are developed in this project.

2) Relevance of the project for you and for your institution

The computing fundamentals course is an introductory course that all university students are required to take. Such a project would benefit all students and instructors that teach the course by providing a standard curriculum.

3) Main results of the project

Throughout the project we created the following:
  • An online E-learning LMS with appropriate OER licenses applied. Portal Link.
  • A course curriculum that combines four different types of OER materials including: OER book, OCW, Slides and Instructional videos. This provides a variety of material for the students and instructors to leverage in explaining and understanding the material.

4) How these results will be used in your teaching

Our OER platform that we have created the material in it will be provided  for all students in all computing fundamentals courses to use as supporting materials within the course syllabus.

5) How these results will be promoted within your university

The content of the LMS will be promoted within the Computing Fundamentals classes for students to use. Additionally, the professors within the local working group would promote the material to other fellow professors teaching the same course. The university is also in the process of creating an open education center and this course will provide a good example to spread the culture of OER.

6) Conclusions, challenges encountered and lessons learnt

– The perspective that that the local working group had about OER is different from what was initially understood.
– Although GJU employs classical education techniques, through this course we have developed a new perspective of how to incorporate open education in the university, mainly as supportive and complementary educational material.
– It was tough searching for and identifying OER content that suits the targeted course.
– It was tough identifying the proper tools to use for creating OER material for the computing fundamentals course.
– This course has been developed as a collaborative work between all team members. Our innovative approach was to choose a course that is taken by the majority of students at GJU and dividing the different OER modules of the course between our team members.