Wishing and hoping...

Adding to the WikiEducator Wishlist - Nice to have
http://www.wikieducator.org/Wishlist

I have been moving content for my Technology Supported Learning workshop / online course to WikiEducator. I plan to offer it as an open not-for-credit course in parallel with the for-credit course I offer at school. Normally, there are only a few faculty who sign up, so it is hard to have an interesting and lively online learning experience. One thing that did help, was sending out an email every 2-3 days providing a small portion of the workshop - overview, learning outcomes, notes, and 2-3 short activities. The 7 topics of the online workshop were broken into 21 chunks that were emailed to participants every couple of days.

Others might be interested in adopting this material for their own teaching or learning. It would be useful to have the information peer-reviewed for me and others to see. Searching for appropriate OERs is still time consuming as there isn't a good recommender system in place yet. Capturing the thoughts of reviews as they review the materials will help everyone.

So here are my wish list additions today.

Tools for facilitating personal learning and online courses / workshops based on content held in WikiEducator - registration, e-mailing list management, pre-programmed serial emails, peer review tracking

• pre-programmed serial emails - participants subscribe to an automated series of emails that can be set to mail out the "next" in the series every n days - allows participants to start any time, optionally facilitator or participant can set their own frequency for emails.
  The daily emails for CCK08 were great. Although they were authored each day, that isn't as important as getting regular emails on topic. These can be set up in advance. The subscription triggers the sequence of emails - this is a PHPlist function I think, though it was so complicated I never actually got it to work.
  
  
• peer review tracking - lots of talk about why OERs are adopted, reused, remixed.. but some of that is because there isn't much information about status, authentication or feedback. This isn't the same as history or discussion

.