English: Postage stamp depicting Martin Luther, the initiator of the Protestant Reformation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Imagine you are advising a funding organisation that wishes to promote activity and research in the area of open education.

• Set out the three main priorities they should address, explaining each one and providing a justification for your list. Share this in the Week 1 forum  and compare with priorities of others.

In this activity you are just expected to start thinking about these issues, and to use your own experience and intuition; you are not expected to research them in depth. You will build on this work during next week, and also for the assignment.

1. Get noticed

A clarion call to those who matter to you online to take notice, take an interest, give it some thought and give it a go. Get the message right. Know why you are doing it. Express it with conviction, professionalism and enthusiasm. Seek out like-minded people.

2. Use the medium

All Martin Luther could do was nail an edict to a church door, but it started the Reformation. There too many doors, and a plethora of nails when you go online. Brief  a team of web experts and web savvy to design a platform and structure that is robust and provides ‘scaffolding’ for what comes next. A river is free and open, a flood or tsunami cannot be controlled. Put in a slide and provide kicker floats and water polo balls. Gather ‘big data’. Watch everything and keep a record.

3. Be a great host

In France you’d be called an ‘animateur’ or ‘realisateur’ in North America you might be ‘the host with the most’ and in Britain ‘a jolly good chap or chappess’. To go online successfully is to transfuse the live component of the institution you represent into the World Wide Web – think of it as an organism that requires nurturing. Be there for them. Have plenty of eager, online net residents to welcome the naïve and the expert, the time starved and those with time on their hands.

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