Help:Hosting courses

This is a placeholder page for instructions and suggestions for hosting a course on OpenWetWare.

FAQ

Why should I host a course on OpenWetWare?

There are several motivations for hosting a course on OpenWetWare ...

1. Enhance student participation in the course. Students have the ability to edit any page on OpenWetWare. So by placing course materials here, you are giving them the ability to revise (and improve) course content.
2. Promote reuse of course materials. All content on OpenWetWare is dual-licensed under the Creative Commons Atrribution ShareAlike and GFDL copyright licenses. Thus, you are making your course materials freely available for others to reuse. Moreover, the wiki format allows people to more easily copy and modify your materials (as compared to static websites and PDF files) so you are also making it easier for others to build upon your work.
3. Facilitate collaborative course development. Many courses are developed jointly among multiple faculty and teaching assistants. Placing the materials on OpenWetWare makes it easy to work together on developing course materials (as compared to emailing word documents back and forth).

Why shouldn't I host a course on OpenWetWare?

A common concern among many OpenWetWare users is that someone may accidentally or intentionally modify a page. However, all changes and updates are tracked and can be easily reverted. Nevertheless, course instructors do need to monitor their course site to ensure that errors are not introduced and propagated around the class.

Am I surrendering copyright to my course materials?

No, you retain copyright to all materials you upload or write on OpenWetWare. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract the Creative Commons Atrribution ShareAlike and GFDL licenses for the versions you placed here.

How do I start?

Get an account

You'll need a user account on OWW to edit pages. Register for an account here.

Learn the basics of wiki editing

If you've never used a wiki before, it is helpful to learn some basics of wiki editing via the OpenWetWare introductory tutorial.

Once you're comfortable with the basics, continue with these directions.

Set up your course template

Once you've registered for an OWW account, start by making your course banner. Your course banner will be used on every course page to help identify it as belonging to your course and to enable students to navigate through the course wiki pages.

1. First, go to the OWW.101 template page (open this in a new browser window if you want to keep reading this text).
2. Click and copy all the wiki markup on that page.
3. In the search box on the lefthand side navigation bar, type Template:<Your course number> (be sure and replace <Your course number> with your course's number like 20.109 or MCB100.