Workshop Description

Image adapted from Wikimedia

Access denied! You do not have permission to view this file! Sound familiar? Imagine how our learners must feel as they take all the necessary steps to begin a course, only to encounter barrier after barrier. Low Wi-Fi causing network disruptions, logging in to multiple sites to view resources, trying to locate a specific unit topic, and having screen display issues.

In this session we will present our use of Bookdown, an open-source R package that helped us remove some of the barriers for learners and instructors. We will share how we moved some of our courses to Bookdown after hearing our Nigerian students had limited access to Moodle. We will explore the many advantages of using Bookdown, such as accessing course content outside of our LMS, providing a collaborative infrastructure for design and maintenance (GitHub), displaying content as a searchable book, and providing accessible versions (ePub/PDF). We will explore other advantages, as well as some challenges we have come across.

The second half of this workshop will allow participants to present their own course challenges. Using Liberating Structures, participants will draw from the expertise of colleagues and consider recommendations to address barriers for learning.

Workshop Learning Outcomes

In this workshop, participants will be able to:
🔍 explore open access tools, such as Bookdown
👍🏽👎🏽discuss advantages and disadvantages of using tools like Bookdown in courses
👐 share their course design challenges and gain insight from others

Workshop Agenda Topics

  1. Problem: Barriers to Access
  2. Solution: Bookdown format
  3. What is Bookdown?
  4. Why Use Bookdown?
  5. Feedback & Challenges
  6. Your Course Design Challenge

Workshop Presentation

Here are the slides that will be presented in the workshop. Feel free to follow along, or explore the rest of the pages in this book!

Note: This book/presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to share and adapt! To edit your own Bookdown book, fork the repo: https://github.com/kmarjanovic/bookdown-workshop.