Online, open access and IT support in Peoples-uni

The idea for, and development of, Peoples-uni was only possible due to the availability of the internet and the existence of an open access educational delivery platform and educational materials.

The Moodle educational platform is an excellent example of the commitment of the IT community to making code freely available, and allowed us to build and provide an educational programme. This was supplemented by volunteers who created code for an enrolment and record system, with for example an automated transcript and certification process.

The Open Educational Resources movement encourages educators to share their materials so that others can use them. Although Peoples-uni developed its own standard format for the modules and courses, we did not design our own resources, using Open Educational Resources throughout. This allowed us to access internationally best practice resources.

In this spirit, our modules were published under Creative Commons licences, so that they can be used by anyone else, and our code for the IT infrastructure is also published in GitHub for all to use.