Testing the waters

We started our notional 5th day of course production explaining ourselves to friends and colleagues - a hand-picked group of experienced teachers, the wider course team and some of the people we thought might have an active interest in the publicly available media and teaching resources we'll make.

The idea was to present what we have so far a bit like a dress fitting - enough shape to suggest what the finished article is going to be like, but not something you'd like to walk around in.  We get some expert feedback on our ideas at an early stage and some nice internal publicity for what we're doing.  Another big advantage is the pressure it put on us to get our ideas into a form we could present to someone else, at an early stage.

Something I've really enjoyed since is the number of people there or have heard about it afterwards who've said they'd like to take the course.  It's a really good sign.

Here's some links for presentation:

A video of the presentation:  http://podcast.open.ac.uk/pod/L1-DigiVideo-20110112

Presentation notes: Handout