This reflective practice session will explore the experiences of the #Openteach project team in developing a flexible and evidence based approach to support professional learning for those who teach online. The #Openteach project was funded by the Irish National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education from 2019-2020.

The project had a number of phases. In phase 1, we conducted a needs analysis of the target population: online educators and online students (Farrell, Brunton, Costello, Donlon,Trevaskis, Eccles, Ní Shé, 2019). In phase 2, a report containing a synthesis of the literature entitled Teaching Online is Different: Critical Perspectives from the Literature was produced (Ní Shé, Farrell, Brunton, Costello, Donlon,Trevaskis, Eccles, 2019). In phase 3, the needs analysis and literature synthesis reports were used to guide the design and development of the #Openteach open, online course. Following the course pilot in March 2020, an evaluation study was conducted in order to explore, understand and evaluate its impact on the professional learning experiences of the participants (Farrell, Brunton, Costello, Donlon,Trevaskis, Eccles, Ní Shé, 2020). The final project output, an open textbook created using Pressbooks will be published in April 2021.

The principle of openness was at the heart of the #Openteach project. All of the resources and intellectual outputs were Creative Commons licensed and openly shared through social media and the project website www.openteach.ie. The #Openteach online course was free and participation was open to anyone, from anywhere, with the capability to join an online course.

This reflective practice session will focus on two aspects of the #Openteach project in detail:
The design, development and delivery of the open online course

The course was designed following the ABC Learning design approach, which resulted in a ten hour, fully online professional development course. The #Openteach course followed a scenario based approach and participant engagement was largely asynchronous and self-paced as this provided the flexible approach recommended in the literature. The course was designed and delivered on the DCU Moodle site called Loop, and used a variety of tools such as H5P, video, audio, discussion forums, quiz, and workshop in its design (see figure 4 below).

The process of creating the #Openteach open textbook

The process of remixing and repurposing the #Openteach course into a textbook proved to be an exercise in backwards design. Using the Pressbooks platform, we rewrote, reorganised, rethought activities in order to adapt the course content and activities to suit the book genre. In addition, we added new content activities drawn from project blog and included participant generated content. One affordance of the Pressbook platform was the ability to integrate video and H5P content activities drawn from the course seamlessly into the book.

This session will share the reflections of the #Openteach team on the practical and pedagogical aspects of the design, development and delivery of the online course and in particular the development of the open textbook using Pressbooks.