Open for Good: 10 years of open course development at Edinburgh University

In 2013 the University of Edinburgh launched our first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in partnership with Coursera, as part of our strategy to become a world leader in digital education. Ten years later, we've built a diverse portfolio of 100 free short online courses, covering everything from Astrobiology to Andy Warhol. We’ve developed partnerships with international education providers, universities and cultural organisations, and our courses have benefitted 4 million learners worldwide.

To ensure our courses are open, sustainable, and accessible to all, openness is embedded in every step of the course creation workflow, supported by a dedicated Online Course Production Service, working closely with our OER Service. Underpinned by the core values of open education, accessibility and quality, the Online Course Production Service works in collaboration with academic partners to ensure all our open courses align with University strategy and the UN Sustainable Development Agenda. Over 1,200 Creative Commons licensed media resources from these courses have been shared through our Open Media Bank where they can be accessed by learners in perpetuity, and downloaded for remixing and repurposing by educators around the world. We also share our workflows and open practice through blog posts, open pedagogy and learning design resources, open policies, and have created two open courses to share our expertise - How to Create an Online Course, and How to Create Video for Online Courses.

Join our team of senior leaders, learning technologists, media producers, instructional designers and open educators to hear the story of how we developed this unique open course development workflow and to discover what we learned along the way.