1) The document discusses the author's experience over a decade developing Open Educational Resources (OERs) for various computer science courses. 2) An important lesson was that OERs encourage the author to provide more detailed content on slides but students' needs were changing, so he focused on writing ebooks with contributions from students and teaching assistants. 3) The author found that putting frameworks like GitHub and open-source software in place helped gather contributions and encouraged students to become OER producers themselves.

1. Some lessons learned developing
OERs over a decade
Olivier Bonaventure, UCL
Nov 9th, 2017

2. Background
• While still a student
– Managed bulletin board systems, Fidonet
– promoted Internet/open-source RTFM
• 1992 : Engineer in Computer Science (ULg)
– Specialisation : Internet and computer networks
• 1998 : CS Professor at UNamur
– Cours en ligne initiative
• 2002 : CS Professor at UCL
– Managed to develop OERs for 3 Bachelor courses

3. First experience in Namur

4. Cours en ligne

5. Technology behind cours-en-ligne
See goo.gl/QmXkzV

6. Results
See goo.gl/b7hXB8

7. Midlife crisis
• Like many professors, I used (too many) slides
when teaching to students
• Cours-en-ligne encouraged me to provide
more and more details on the slides, but
– Students where changing
– I was getting more and more frustrated in
explaining the same stuff with detailed slides
• Applied for a sabbatical in … Louvain-la-Neuve

8. An open-source networking ebook

9. The various meanings of open
• Anyone can access the content
– Available online in HTML and pdf formats
• Anyone can modify the content
– Creative Commons License
– All source code hosted on github.com
– https://github.com/obonaventure/cnp3
– Uses restructured text and open-source software
to rebuild the entire ebook
• Received various contributions

10. Top contributors
• Eduardo Grosclaude
– Started a Spanish translation
• Graphics and figures
– Pierre Reinbold, Nipaul Long
• Students
– Matthieu Baerts, Matthieu Jadin, Benoit Legat, Joris
Vanherck, Alexis Nootens, …
• Teaching Assistants
– Laurent Vanbever, Olivier Tilmans, Juan Cordero,
Virginie Van den Schrieck, Damien Saucez, Mickael
Hoerdt, ...

11. Be prepared for the unexpected
goo.gl/M3GNMq

12. Third opportunity
• Bachelor 2, reorganise the systems course
– Unix, programming with C language
• Start by writing the course ebook with two
teaching assistants
– Gregory Detal, Christoph Paasch
– https://github.com/obonaventure/SystemesInformati
ques
• Slides are created just-in-time from the ebook

13. Systems course
https://sites.uclouvain.be/SystInfo/index.html

14. Encouraging student contributions

15. Contributors
• Students
– Quentin Deconinck, Adrien Scheuer, David Sarkozi,
Simon Hardy, Benoît Legat, Nicolas Houtain,
Maxime Demol, Kilian Verhetsel, …
• Teaching Assistants
– Gregory Detal, Christoph Paasch, Fabien Duchene,
Antoine Caillau, David Lebrun, …

16. CS1 : last attempt
• First Computer Science course for students in
– Engineering
– Computer Science
– Mathematics
– …
• 650+ students this year
• How to help them learn better ?

17. INGINIOUS
• Started as a student project,
trying to build spinoff company
http://www.inginious.org

18. Creating content on INGINIOUS
prototype for CS1

19. Creating content on INGINIOUS
open exercises
https://github.com/UCL-INGI/CS1-Java

20. Empowering students
openweek.info.ucl.ac.be

21. Next generation of OER producers

22. Summary
• Benefits of Open Education Resources
– Resource is easy to reuse, first by yourself
– Encourage others to contribute
• Don't forget that students can contribute as well
– Puts a framework to organise the resource
• Advice to create OER content
– Put yourself in a situation where you have to create it
• Tell others that you will be developing this content
– Becomes your top priority for some period of time
• Caveat
– Don't expect that everybody will find your OER because it
is open and online.
– You might need to spend time to promote it…