Open Access Teaching: the ‘Roddy’s Courses’ blog 12 months on ….

Now’s a good time to cast a quick look back over the past twelve months as I’ve used the blog to teach my First Year courses in Sweden (2012 and 2013) and South Africa (2013).  You can see from the statistics that there have been lots of visits (I’m sure some of them are return visits) and, not surprisingly, most of them come from Sweden where the course has been taught twice and South Africa where it has been taught once.

The total today (since August 2012) is 3381.  So something like 2500 visits since I posted about using the blog in this way in October 2012.  Quite a few of the USA visits are from search engines but then there’s a long tail of visitors from right around the world.

From my viewpoint this is a nice way to make material easily available to anyone who wants to access it – whether they are taking the courses or not.  It’s also easier and quicker to upload into the blog once than into the two different web based learning platforms (Moodle at Rhodes and DisCo at Högskolan Väst).  Perhaps most important is the fact that comments from students taking the classes have all been very positive so far.  Here’s a screenshot of the ClustrMap showing where visits have come from.