Advice to authors

First the legal advice:

Please, try to state always the licensing terms explicitly for any materials you add or use. See the link to Copyright and Licensing on the main page of the EMBnet e-Learning web site for details as well as helpful advice.

If you use materials from other sources in your course, try to make sure that:

• they are legally useable under Fair Use, academic or educational terms

or else

• they are prominently noted as external contributions (including a link to the original site whenever possible)
• they are available or have been released under a license equally or less restrictive than the one you use
  
• you attibute properly authorship of materials
  
• they include the original license so readers will know which terms apply to which materials

Include a history page on the header of all your courses. This page should detail in a historic way (much like the historic annotations of source code) the original author, date and license, as well as all changes made to the original materials, stating for each change who did it, a description of the changes made, why they were done and the date when they were applied.

I always try to make it prominent and evident, usually stating it forefront in the course headers and/or the introduction.

Choosing a name

When one starts something it is tempting to let the horses run loose (like a pioneer in the prairies of Far West) and start producing materials as quick as you can. I know, I have done it mayself and now regret it (well, no, sort of) for my lack of provision for the future.

Your first step when you create a course will be to give it a name. This is fine, it is your course and you get to name it, that's fair. However you must keep in mind that other people are using the system as well, and they may as well want to use the same name, or even have chosen it before you came up with it. That is one reason to be cautious when choosing a name, but not the only one.

A more compelling reason has less to do with the adventurous world of explorers and more with the clerical routine of the real world. You are creating a course for a reason, and that is to have students use it. Think of it: these students will probably want a graduation certificate. Good, you think, it is easy to create one and mail it over. But that is not the end of the story: now you have a liability to prove the grades you assigned should any questions arise, and hence you must conserve this specific instance of the course for some time. So, if you want to reuse the materials you will need to create a new course, import everything (except user data) from the old one, maybe add some changes and go ahead. Now you have a name conflict: you stepped in your toes.

How long do you need to keep these materials? Well, it depends on how long you will need them. If you can save all relevant data to a safe place for later referral, you may be able to do without it and delete the course after several months, a year or whatever you are required the grades to remain unchallenged. The alternative probably is that it must be maintained for life.

Maintained for life! How comes? you ask. Well, people forgets or loses things that they will need later. When the time comes, maybe ten years after the course took place, you are guaranteed to get a request from an old student asking for a new certificate to prove his grade somewhere. And when this time comes, where are you going to look into to find out what happened? Was actually this person a student of yours? In which course? Which year? What happened at the time?

Hence my advise for you is simple: plan that any course you create may stay around for a long time. You don't want conflicts with other teachers, not even with yourself later on, and you want to be able to identify an odd course that took place long ago easily.

As a courseware system is usually a shared facility, you should find out what the convention is in your server. A sensible example of a naming policy might be:

• Choose a name for your course
• Anything you like, better if it is descriptive and related to the topics, and even better yet if it sounds attractive
• Add to it something to identify yourself (it may be the two-letter country code, the acronym of your institution, etc...)
• Add to it a date, may be the year, or a year and month,... depending on the periodicity you expect for the course
• Choose a short name for the course
• Following the same advice but making it shorter

An example might be "Molecular Dynamics, EMBnet/CNB, Feb 2006", with a short name like "MD-ES-2006".

If you are to reuse the materials of a course later on, all you need to do is create a new course with the updated name, and then use the import utility of the system to carry over all the materials from the old course, or may be use a backup (lacking user data) to restore all the materials to the newly created course.

Always include a backup of your course

Have you ver used a reference book in your discipline? Ever wondered why it was so? Ever wished to write one?

It is very easy: the continued success of most reference books depends on two factors, one is the quality of the contents, of course, the other, less evident, relies on the continued quality maintained by contributors. Most reference books are no longer written by their original author (possibly dead several decades ago), and still they keep their original name alive for ever. This is because the original author did not mind others adding or enhancing to his work, and because those others kept his name to acknowledge his seminal work.

You can do the same. Write your course and pay close attention to quality. Then make sure others can use and add to it easily. Let them help you enhance it.

The only problem is that if you just publish a work it will be difficult for others to use or add to it unless they all use your own server to work and lecture... something that is very difficult to do and coordinate on a world-wide basis. The only practical way is to give them the contents for their own use. However, copying all the contents of a feature-rich environment such as Moodle one by one is a daunting task (I know, I've done it myself many times), and almost nobody will take the pains.

That is why you should always include on your courses:

• a full backup in moodle format
• a history page detailing all modifications
• a license notice

This way it will be easy for everybody to know that they can make a copy and use your materials elsewhere, it will be trivial to do so, and acknowledging your work will be a snap.

It would be wise if you also request cordially that significant changes be submitted back to you for merging in the original course and further sharing, or at least, that they notify you if they use your materials.

Even if you don't get contributions, you will be able to state in your curriculum that your works have reached a level of quality high enough to guarantee their use at others institutions -which is an acknowledgement by them of the quality of your work-.

Think of it, what does look better in your curriculum: stating you are a great professor with terribly good course notes that you offer as a private added-value for your students or stating that your course notes may not be that terribly good as you yourself would describe them, nor exclusive to your students, but they are good enough for Harvard, Yale or Cambridge to use them on their own courses?

Personally, I know what would make me more proud of my work. And certainly praise by others ranks higher than comptentuous praise by myself.

Make it easy for others to use your notes and they will. Make it difficult and they will write their own.

To provide a course backup, first create a backup of your course, then move it to the files area (as the backup area is not accesible to other people) and finally make a link to this accessible backup from the header of the course.

Always include a history page

Whether you used materials from others or not, whether you allow for modifications or not, it is very difficult that any work will remain unchanged for a long time. May be only you make changes to it, but it is still important to clearly annotate all changes done, why they where done, and include dates and authorship details.

This is akin to common practice in software development and is important for the same reasons:

• this is the only way to properly acknowledge all authors involved in writing a work
• this is the only way to know who made what, when and why
• the history serves as a track of changes
• a properly written history allows you to prove when some important piece of work was actually done (and defend your authorship in case of legal disputes)

Including a history page allows you to acknowledge the original authors, as well as any further contributing authors, know what each person has done and understand why, so you can further enhance knowingly if needed, and of course allows you as well to state which changes you have contributed, explaining your reasons.

This allows everybody to know the relative importance of each contribution as well as to understand why they were done and if it makes sense to add, remove or revert changes to suit local needs. It converts the course in a living work, not just a text cast in stone that will become and obsolete historic curiosity sooner than expected.

Allow provisions for recovering from major changes.

Accordingly, you should keep in mind an important derivation of this principle: you want a history because you admit that a course is a living work subject to continual changes, driven by the authors' perceived needs at a given time. It is possible then that some changes may be too specific or time-dependent, or even that some decisions may prove to be plainly wrong (we all make mistakes and I'm no exception). Hence, you should allow provisions for recovering from major changes.

The simplest way to do so is to make backups of the course and annotate them accordingly (e.g. by renaming them with significant names). This is simple, but has some drawbacks, the main one being that backups are not carried over with the course when copying it, and hence previous materials may be lost when the course is imported to other institutions. Still, you should make and keep backups of your courses after every major change (e.g. adding new materials or activities), and download a copy of them to a safe place. Failure to do so, will result in much sorrow sooner or later.

Ideally we would like to use something like RCS or CVS to keep version control of a course materials. We may just uncompress the backup (which is actually an XML file) and store it on a versioning system but this entails that all course contents are stored together, making it difficult to recover partial changes (like e.g. deleting a single lesson or a number of assignments). If at any point it becomes easier to make partial backups of course resources or sections, this might become an option of choice

An alternative solution is to split courses in metacourse sections and maintain each separately. This means that a complex course is built of smaller sub-courses that can be combined freely and re-ordered to make for the whole. For complex courses this is probably the best and most versatile solution, allowing as well others to use, substitute and combine those portions of your work they need. It simplifies also management of sections and their backups.

A compromise solution when changes do not apply to whole sections is to hide course materials instead of deleting them. In this scenario, instead of removing what you do not need or substituting it for your own version, you just add the new materials and hide the non-needed ones from view. This way if you later discover you want to recover them, all you need to do is unhide them and you are done. In due time, after various releases, if it becomes obvious you will never use them again (maybe because you have better new materials now) you can finally delete them once you feel strongly safe they are no longer needed.

Still, make backups, backups, backups, download them, annotate them and keep them around for emergencies and -most of all- history record. It may all start as a pet play project, but there is no guarantee others won't buy into it and make it into a wonderful ultimate work of art. You have a duty to History and your descendants to keep a record of changes so others can later study and learn how this wonder came out to be and into existence. Ever wondered how the piramids were built? It is still puzzling us, and that's because we have not been able to find any record of the process. Mind you, your great-great-great- ... -grandson three thousand years from now may be a new Indiana Jones and wonder how your work could succeed. Be nice: leave them some hints.

Don't write, reuse

This is closely related to our next topic, quality. The best way to ensure quality and save work is to rely on proven works of excellent quality already produced by others.

In a world of ever increasing complexity no man(woman) is any longer an island: it is ever more difficult to become the humanist wise knowing everything. Do not misconstrue me: I'm not saying it is impossible, I pride myself in trying to, but -and I can tell from experience- it is ever more difficult. As a result, we rely every day more on work group and collaboration to create things.

Even if you are the final humanist genius, you can build nice works like the paintings of Picasso or Dalí, but you cannot go any further: no actor, film director, architect, music composer, etc.. can work alone. Even Beethoven in all his genius needed an orchestra to play his works, Gaudi needed legions of masons to construct his buildings, Spielberg needed productors, actors, cameramen, and a legion of people to film his movies, heck! even Caesar needed legions to build the Roman Empire!

You may have in mind the ultimate course, but building it will surely need the help of others. Announce your intentions, share your ideas with them, collaborate and start working towards your goal.

It should be obvious by now after all we have said: sharing our work saves us efforts and allows us to reach greater quality. Just do not forget all the previous advice given:

• look around for good materials to use (more on this later)
  
• make sure you are allowed to use those materials (either by fair use or because their licenses allow you to)
• always, always, always attribute works to their authors (you don't want your works stealed, do you? then don't steal those of others)
• use the history page to keep track of all contributors and changes
• make backups, backups, backups, save a copy, annotate them and keep them around for emergencies and most important of all, for the record of History
  

So, how do you find good materials?

The first approach is to just look into the Internet: you surely have lots of bookmarks to nice materials you have found out there, and it is very easy to just make a cursory search on your preferred search engine (Google, Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos) to find the most popular ones.

This usually works. Just try to use content neutral search engines. Some engines are too tighly tied to some private company whose main interest is not the search market itself, and who will shamelessly give higher precedence without warning to hits that point to themselves, give them some advantage or in which they have a vested interest. These engines will make your life a lot more difficult. Run away from them like the pest. You know who they are.

As we have said, this usually works. It has one major drawback: most materials you will find this way just happen to have only a copyright notice pointing to their author or even none at all (in which case default copyright terms apply, i.e. you can not reuse those materials). In these cases you must contact the author and ask for permission to use their work and redistribute it. Whenever you do, please consider asking them to visit the Creative Commons web site or their local legal advisory team to select a license and state it clearly in the work so others in the future will know and save the hassle of contacting them over and over.

But there is a much better approach: Creative Commons and open licenses are now flourishing everywhere. It's nothing new: almost everybody who published their works on the Internet originally intended it to be openly and publicly available, only they didn't care to state it expliciltly (it was assumed by default). In the mid-1990s many commercial-minded people started to join the Internet and to include restrictive licenses in their works. This confused things a lot and gave birth to all these new open documentation movements: there was now a need imposed by these money-avid newcomers to clarify usage terms.

If you use the first approach you will actually find that many materials were indeed intended to be openly used by their authors, only they didn't say so explicitly and later on never took the trouble to change every single page they wrote to affix a license. Still, getting in touch is a hassle, often compounded with the fact that the original address in the document has changed and the author needs to be tracked to his new location.

So, back to option two. We said there is a better way, thanks to the uprise of the new explicit open licensing movements, so which way may this be?

Easy: the major search engines include an advanced search option where you can state clearly the licensing terms you want associated with the pages returned. So, just go to Google, Yahoo, Altavista or any open document portal (like the Creative Commons, Wikipedia, MIT coureseware or other web sites) select the advanced search option and restrict your search to openly licensed available documents. Now just navigate those hits and verify the license is indeed what you expect. You'll have saved a lot of work.

One additional word of advice: do not look only for English pages (or for the sake of it, pages in your target language). Many English works are linked to from non-English pages and reachable only from them (e.g. because the author wrote the material in English but linked to it from a local language page). Often you'll find excellent materials available directly only for students (i.e. you won't be able to add them to the course but may want to link to them). Do not be afraid of following links in Chinese, Russian, Arab, Egyptian, Greek, Spanish, whatever. You'll find lots of nice surprises. And a trick navigating foreign pages: often pages are named in English, so although contents may be unreadable, putting the cursor over links will show the english name of the page pointed to giving you an ad hoc translation of the link.

Finally, although this is not needed, think that you will probably want to give a certificate to students to prove they made your course. It is not a bad idea to make the blueprint of the certificate an integral part of your course materials, and even may be each personalized certificate once finished. You may store certificates hidden from user eyes so they can't access it, and you will find it handy when the time comes to issue the certificate. Not only after the course ends, but also if some years later a student comes asking for a copy. Furthermore, you will have saved the work for future instances of the course (a significan saving if you like to or must produce ellaborate certificates with your insitution logo, etc.).

Check your course quality

Last we come to the most relevant point. If you followed our advice until now you will already have lost of excellent materials to start from. Most probably you will not need to do anything at all besides glueing them together and adding a few minor odds and ends (forums, workshops, exercises). Your course will have popped out of nothing just by the magic of the Internet.

Now, if you add or start from scratch, you must pay close attention to quality. This is easier said than done today.

Today most materials are or have been written by people who learned in the last (20th) Century, and used to ancient learning methods. We are reaching to a Brave New World, and need to change our way to think and do things in order to adapt to this ever faster changing World.

Some advice is always safe: keep scientific properness to a maximum. Be precise, use language properly, be clear and concise. Add a grain of salt (humour). This has always and will always be good.

Beyond this, learn to be attractive to students: first, stay close to them (use but not abuse colloquial language, you are trying to make scientists, not -shrug- lay news(wo)men). Second, try to find the equilibrium point between a teacher's distance and a group member (you want them to join the group of elite scientists, your group), you should rather behave like a welcoming group leader integrating a newcomer than like the classic professor in a crystal tower. Third, work in group (you already do when using other people's materials) both with other teachers and with your students, and teach them to work in group (that is what they will be required to do in the Real World later on) and most important of all

A good starting point is the moodle documentation, to which you can find a link in the EMBnet training web site. It is a lot less important to know the tool than to understand the education principles involved. Any good teacher knows that the tools he uses are irrelevant, it is the attitude that matters. Any good teacher knows that knowledge itself is irrelevant, it is the ability to evoke and use it that matters. But most important of all, any good worker and manager knows that it is not personal abilities that matter, but the efficiency to do quality work.

Personally, my experience has shown me that Life itself is a complex thing. It doesn't matter whether you know a lot or not, but whether you can get the job done. It doesn't matter whether you do the work yourself or not, but whether you can get the job done. Natural selection acts on results, not on how these are accomplished: to live in water an animal must adapt to it, it doesn't matter if it is a fish, a mammal or a turtle, each of them will find different solutions, but they all will live in water.

When I do evaluate students I emphasize two things: they can and should cooperate to pass the exam, and that I don't care how they do it as long as they pass. This entangles two things: first, obviously, I need to design different exams for each student, but second and most important, I evaluate their ability to pass, not how they do. In real life they will be asked to solve problems, but nobody will ask them to know the academic way to solve problems: they may have a huge memory and remember all possible solutions, or be quick thinkers and find it on the fly, or good readers and look it up, or good at personal relations and get others' help, or even charming leaders and get others to do their work (what's a good manager after all?). Actually they will need to be conversant in all of these abilities. By forcing a single approach (the classical exam) I would be castrating them of all other abilities. By giving them freedom I expose them to all of these strategies, they will know they also work, will learn to use them by themselves, and will learn to impose limits on abuse, and -in one word- will be really prepared to live in the Real World.

Oh, but this is my personal advice, and as usual, your mileage may vary.