Exploring and Building Open [Source] Software for Tech-savvy Educators and OER Publishers

Well, that didn’t take long for plans to change… unexpectedly I have been asked to teach CMPT-363 once again spring so I am now heads-down in planning the course while considering what I learned from my students in the second fully online CMPT-363 this past fall at SFU. Some key changes will include trying a student open mic Q & A, a new weekly review quiz tutorial, a new term project, more frequent session mini-breaks, and a somewhat revised approach to the student-generated final exam.

Recently I tweeted about my new student well-being heuristics with a simple example of them at work, and I thought I would share them here:

Student well-being tip: Are you planning for an open book style final exam? Consider adding a Topics page to your course site to help support students locating useful related course content quickly, easily, and with less stress!

Here are some #SFU CMPT-363 examples👇 pic.twitter.com/AYFBTf3uEm

— Hibbitts Design (@hibbittsdesign) December 3, 2020

Wow, it’s been a while since I last posted something here… I’ve been full-steam ahead learning from my students in the first fully online CMPT-363 this summer at SFU.

While not originally planned, I am very excited to teach CMPT 363 User Interface Design once again this fall. I’ve already been working on some structural course changes based on feedback from this summer’s students, and more still to do.

For students not in other Canvas LMS courses a multi-device site with Canvas links is available, and for students in other Canvas courses content is seamlessly embedded into Canvas.

I can’t wait to connect with my new students in September, but in the meantime I will try to sneak in the last bit of summer🙂

I hope that you are safe and keeping connected with those you care about in these emotionally and physically challenging times.

With all SFU courses moving online this summer I decided to apply to teach CMPT 363 User Interface Design several weeks ago, and just this week learned that the additional section of the course would go ahead. For students not in other Canvas LMS courses a multi-device site with Canvas links is available, and for students in other Canvas courses content is seamlessly embedded into Canvas.

I am really looking forward to learning with my students once again!

It’s a cliche (for a good reason), but I it’s hard to believe the summer is almost over and the fall teaching term is about to begin.

Over the summer I continued working on all of my Grav open education and publishing projects. A highlight was the brand new Grav skeleton package Open Presentation Hub to help create, publish, and share Markdown-based slides with the Presentation Plugin by Ole Vik, which uses the Reveal.js Framework.

Based on discussions with two educators (thanks Colin and Brian), the ability for multiple courses to be included within a single Grav Open Course Hub is now supported!

Figure 1 - Multiple courses within a single Grav install.

As an experiment I’ve created a small set of 30-second demo videos to give a glimpse into some major and minor features of my Open Course Hub and Open Publishing Space projects. I recently tweeted these videos and thought I would share them here too:

Ever want to re-purpose site content by embedding a page without its global navigation, sidebar or footer? With the @getgrav Open Course Hub or Publishing Space you can easily do that for any page with the 'chromeless' content display URL parameter👇(#CanvasLMS example shown) pic.twitter.com/Z8LFgnINZR

— Hibbitts Design (@hibbittsdesign) September 10, 2018

While I’ve been in ‘heads-down’ mode with my SFU CMPT 363 User Interface Design course this summer I’ve also been working away on a brand new Bootstrap 4 based theme for Grav. I recently tweeted a few highlights about the early release of this new theme, called Bootstrap4 Open Matter, and I thought I would share them here:

It's an unofficial official release (like 'double secret probation') - the Bootstrap4 Open Matter theme is now at https://t.co/UDkA52gP6f. This one theme can create open + collaborative Markdown-based blogs, course hubs and more! Git Sync & 'chromeless' content display included👍 pic.twitter.com/Qrdy6D5oTb

— Hibbitts Design (@hibbittsdesign) July 31, 2018

I am excited to be sharing the most recent developments of my Grav Open Course Hub project at the Festival of Learning on May 29th.

Here is the description of my session:

Delivering a Better Experience by Using the Open, Collaborative and Flexible Grav CMS – Inside or Outside of your LMS

Want to provide students and course facilitators a better online experience but still want or need to use the existing institutional LMS? Faced with this exact challenge, Paul Hibbitts started to develop a set of components in 2016 for the modern Grav Content Management System to partner with his institution’s LMS (Canvas). Grav leverages forward-looking standards such as Markdown for platform-independent content and enables Git-based (i.e. GitHub, GitLab, GitBook, etc.) collaborative workflows, both which naturally also supports the 5 Rs of Open Educational Resources. In addition, the ability to use GitHub Desktop for mirroring Git-based content to one’s own computer for backup and editing with the tools of your choice not only brings peace of mind but also a highly efficient workflow.

It’s a launch: here is the (mostly open) learning ecosystem I’ve assembled for this Fall’s Simon Fraser University CMPT-363 User Interface Design course.

Figure 1. Learning Ecosystem for CMPT-363 @ SFU 2017.

It was created to support the pedagogical goals for the course while also delivering...