I wanted to write a quick post outlining the process of a ‘course sprint’ to share with some of the communities that I’m involved with including the P2PU, School of Open and the FLOSS Manuals community. I think this methodology can be of use to emerging groups of on-line educators creating open education resources (OERs) about Free Culture and Free Software.

The  course, ’Look at Open Video’, was created for the School of Open as part of a ‘course sprint’ which tool place at the Supermarkt as part of the  Open Video Forum December 2012 in Berlin. The forum aimed to bring together participants interested in open video in the context of a euro-african culture and technology project called Mokolo. The event was supported by xm:lab. For ongoing information on the project see – ovf.xmlab.org.

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Here is a link to the course on P2PU.org – https://p2pu.org/en/groups/a-look-at-open-video/. The P2PU course is the best place to give feedback but it is available in many different formats.

Preparing for the Course Sprint

Villa ACT – African Tech Hub in Dakar, Senegal. [The Python is superimposed]

The OVF event aimed to support the aims of a project called Mokolo Video. One part of the project is to create some Open Educational Resources (OER). xm:labs  got in touch with FLOSS Manuals to support the creation of these OERs.

The end goal is the creation of an Open Video Handbook to address some of the needs of the Mokolo Lab project. Other goals included using the process of creating OERs as a way of increasing knowledge of the Mokolo Video project and engaging with partnership work in this area. To achieve some of these secondary goals it made sense to complete something concrete during the timescale of the gathering.

I suggested we create a course as part of the School of Open giving an introduction to the world of open video.  The organiser, Soenke Zehle, readily agreed, happy that this event could be a collaboration with Creative Commons. The course sprint format was a realistic goal for a first iteration of Mokolo OERs and a great way to spread the message of the project to a wider audience with the help of School of Open.

While ‘iterative’ development is more often applied to writing code, it also makes perfect sense when generating documentation and educational resources. We can draw on the philosophy – “Improve code iteratively: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” - to rapidly create OERs to bring them to a state ready for feedback and improvement from a wider community of peers and educators.

The Course Sprint Process & Contents

The course sprint took place on the Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th of December 2012. Many thanks to the people involved and especially to Soenke Zehle from xm:lab for pulling it all together.

Name check: Here is a quick name check of the course sprinters. These were a great bunch of people and I look forward to working with them if at all possible!

Emeka Okoye (Vi­kant­ti Soft­ware, Nex­t2Us), Vin­cent La­goey­te (vil­laACT), Qui­rin Pils (Pi­xel­chiefs, mokolo.labs), Jan Tret­schok (xm:lab, mokolo.labs), Fua Tse (ac­tiv­s­paces, mokolo.labs), Kes­ter Ed­wards (transmission.cc), Mick Fuzz (FLOSS­ma­nu­als, V4C), Jan Ger­ber (Pad.Ma), Hen­ri­ke Grohs (Goe­the In­sti­tut Jo­han­nes­burg), RMO (numm.org)

This Course Sprint process used some elements of the Book Sprint process developed by Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals.  Book Sprints create full books in 3-5 days with 6-10 participants in a very intensive process. For this situation, the outcome, commitment levels and timescale for the Course Sprint were different making a Book Sprint impossible (remember – this was happening over one weekend in Berlin!).

The process of deciding our audience, structuring content and allocating the chapters to writers was accelerated into a two hour process and although we had a late start, we were able to start writing straight after lunch. We wrote individually but as we shared the same space, collaborative discussions, suggestions, feedback and revisions happened naturally.

Deciding the target audience of the contents of the course was relatively easy. Many of the participants and remote participants in the forum are part of a wide group of IT learning centres in Africa called African IT Hubs. During the forum it became clear that there is currently limited incentive for African IT Hubs to take up using Free Software video solutions. During remote participative via Skype, there was a and explicit call from a participant involved to create resources which could be used to facilitate Hackathons using open video technology. 

We wanted to start with contents that would be useful to a wider audience and then concentrate on taking knowledge deeper so that it would be a useful roadmap for new developers in this area. We accepted that the day and half we had to do this would only allow us to create a draft course.

The course in two parts. In the first half we took apart video files to investigate codecs and containers, get practical with sections on creating open video files and get into understanding and creating subtitles in an open and accessible way.

In the second half, we took it much deeper with examples about using open video on the web, moving video metadata around and we dived into command line video manipulation and key-frame Datamoshing which is a surreal but fun way to learn about how digital video works (have a look at this is if this is the only thing you check out).

One of the reasons for splitting the course into two halves based on level was to be able to create P2PU / Open Badges for future versions of the course. There are also assessment tasks for each of the stages of the course.

Feedback Process, Community and Assessment

I’ve found that the most valuable part of the process of creating a P2PU course is the feedback that you get from your peers as they try to complete the course. The review process is a good chance to Pause for a bit and get your course licked into better shape before rolling it out wider.

I am very happy to say that there is more of 1 and 2 than 3 on P2PU. I know they work hard to create that kind of environment. I’m really looking forward to people taking the course and giving us some feedback.