Specific information about this course and its requirements can be found below. For more general information about taking Saylor Academy courses, read the Saylor Student Handbook.
Open Education Resource Foundation
This course will enable learners to develop and apply digital and learning literacies critical for learning success in tertiary education for the 21st century.
Learners will develop the digital and learning literacies to maximize their learning in a contemporary digital learning environment for higher education. You will develop the academic skills to discern the credibility, accuracy and integrity of open access resources available on the Internet and corresponding digital tools to research, analyze and present information for academic purposes.
You will also develop competence in a range of digital tools including: social media; communication and collaboration tools; and publishing tools; to support learning in contemporary society. This will include knowledge of copyright, open licensing, media literacy and digital citizenship.
Note: This course will initially be offered concurrently in partnership with OERu. You are more than welcome to work through all four units at your own pace, but may find an increase in student-to-student interaction if following the schedule used by OERu and their community of learners.
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
The primary learning materials for this course are readings, lectures, video tutorials, and other resources.
All course materials are free to access, and can be found through the links provided in each unit and subunit of the course. Pay close attention to the notes that accompany these course materials, as they will instruct you as to what specifically to read or watch at a given point in the course, and help you to understand how these individual materials fit into the course as a whole. You can also access a list all of the materials used in this course by clicking on Resources in the course menu.
Throughout this course you will find numerous prompts to participate in course discussion. Most of these prompts include a link to a topic on discourse.saylor.org, where you can post your replies. Each of those topics already include tags that will allow your reply posts to also be fed into one of the the larger Learning in a Digital Age course feeds, connecting you to a global audience of learners. (There is one feed for each micro-course, for instance, this feed for LiDA101.)
You are also encouraged to start your own discussions based around what you learn in this course. You can create new discussions by signing into discourse.saylor.org and starting a new topic. Make sure to tag your topics with either lida101, lida102, lida103, or lida104 (depending on which unit of this course your discussion corresponds to). Alternatively, you can use the following links that organize posts by tag. New topics created from these pages will automatically include those tags:
If you would like to gain formal academic credit, this course forms part of the OERu's free first year of study with pathways to achieve one of two exit qualifications:
You will also be able to earn an optional micro-credential for assessed learning from Edubits. Successfully completing the four micro-credentials for the Learning in a digital age course will qualify you for transcript credit towards the Certificate of Higher Education in Business (OERu).
LIDA100: Learning in a Digital Age is a self-paced course in which you the learner determines when you will start and when you will complete the course. There is no instructor or predetermined schedule to follow. While learning styles can vary considerably and any particular learner will take more or less time to learn or read, we estimate that the "average" learner will take 30 hours to complete each unit. Preparing and participating in assessment for credit will take an additional 10 hours per unit.
The total time commitment for LiDA100 if you are planning to achieve college credit is 160 hours. However, you do not need to complete the full course in a single sitting, because you can complete the units individually taking your own schedule into account. We recommend that you work through the course at a pace that is comfortable for you and allows you to make regular (daily, or at least weekly) progress. It's a good idea to also schedule your study time in advance and try as best as you can to stick to that schedule.
Learning new material can be challenging, so below we've compiled a few suggested study strategies to help you succeed:
This course is delivered fully online. You will be required to have access to a computer or web-capable mobile device and have consistent access to the internet to either view or download the necessary course resources and to attempt any auto-graded course assessments.
For additional technical guidance check out Saylor’s tech-FAQ and the Moodle LMS tutorial.
Learning in a digital age is a course about learning on the Internet. Consequently, you will need to create accounts on different technologies. You will be directed in the course materials where and when to create online accounts for selected technologies. However, at the start of your course, we recommend that you also create an account on the OERu LiDA101 micro-course site (opens in a new window) by clicking on the "head graphic" at the top of the site.
There is no cost to access and enroll and participate in this course. All required course resources linked throughout the course, including textbooks, videos, webpages, activities, etc are accessible for no charge. The course is also designed so that learners can complete all activities using free and open source software, so there is not cost associated with course specific software.
Should you decide to be assessed for formal college credit, there is a cost for the assessment options. More details about those assessment options, and their costs, can be found within each course unit.
The LIDA100 course a unique international collaboration involving the Saylor Academy and the OERu international network of institutions. The Saylor learning community will have the opportunity to interact with the OERu learning community using open technologies for these communities to interact with each other.