Designing a Continuing Professional Development MOOC on OER and OEP

At a time when ICT-integrated teaching and learning is gaining wider popularity within the education system in Sri Lanka, and with the growing need for raising awareness on the potentials of Open Educational Resources (OER) and promoting Open Educational Practices (OEP) among educators, the Open University of Sri Lanka (OUSL) embarked on a novel venture to develop a Massive Open Online Course for Continuing Professional Development (CPD MOOC) to support adoption of OER and OEP by practitioners. Adoption of OER and OEP will essentially require a proper understanding of the concept of OER, and skills in finding, identifying, and creating OER as well as how best to integrate OER to support the teaching-learning process. This requires practitioners to move beyond a mere focus on access to OER, and to engage in various scholarly practices of openness, resulting in OEP which are participatory, collaborative and innovative in nature. While the concept of MOOCs has gained significant attention in making free and open learning opportunities accessible to large numbers, the challenge lies in the design of an effective massive online course that is as robust as a great online course with smaller student numbers where good principles of teaching and learning are maintained. To face this challenge, a Design-based Research (DBR) approach is adopted in this project, which is a systematic and flexible methodology aimed at improving educational practices through an iterative process of analysis, design, development, and implementation. This paper describes the analysis and design phases of this process, during which the learning experience design of the MOOC, based on a scenario-based learning approach took place. It discusses the challenges faced and strategies adopted by the course team in their pursuit to answer the question, ‘How best to design an effective CPD MOOC on OER and OEP’?