Widget creation and learning design templates – re-use in action

Sustainability and re-use of project outputs is a perennial issue. However I was really heartened this week to see a great example of a project using and building on previously funded work from the WIDE project.

WIDE is part of the current JISC funded DVLE programme. It is one of three six month rapid development projects. “WIDE is a joint project between the Accessibility Research Centre at Teesside University, JISC TechDis and Portland College that aims to make online learning more accessible and inclusive for disabled students/learners. Our objective is to develop open educational resources that will improve or support the learning experience and can be shared and adapted by the community.”

The project has been developing widgets through a series of user engagement workshops. The workshops have adapted the learning design templates created the the RLO CETL a couple of years ago as part of their Sharing the Load project which was part of the JISC funded Design for Learning Programme. They’ve also created a widget storyboard template building from the original learning design templates.. Having been involved in the support of that programme as well as the DVLE programme, it is heartening to see re-use and progression of project outputs.

The WIDE project website has more information on the workshops as well as links to the widgets that have been built so far (28 and counting!), a tutorial “creating a calendar widget”, APIs, and lots of other great stuff. It’s well worth spending half an hour browsing resources – who knows you maybe inspired for some re-use too.