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 ...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
For now, a sample course page has been posted at OWW.101.
Feel free to copy code from here to your own course pages. Just be sure and replace every instance of OWW.101 in the wiki page with your own course's number.
How do I upload my lecture slides?
PDFs, word docs, powerpoint files or keynote files can all be uploaded to OpenWetWare.
- Click on upload file link on the left side of the screen (under toolbox).
- Follow the directions from there to upload the file.
- OpenWetWare doesn't explicitly support PDF, powerpoint or keynote filetypes. Therefore these files are treated as images and an image page is generated upon upload. To include a link directly to the PDF from your course page, you'll have to click on the filename from the image page and copy the corresponding URL from your browser.
For instance, here is a link to the image page of a PDF that has been uploaded to OpenWetWare: File:Msb4100025.pdf
Here is a link to the corresponding PDF file itself: http://openwetware.org/images/e/ef/Msb4100025.pdf
