Re-using 2 minutes guides
Last term we added a 2 minute guide to our comprehensive online support site. This site has always been designed for the least technically confident user imaginable, as we know from our support calls that they are the ones who need the help. However in the last couple of years it has become clear that the majority of our students are competent IT users who didn’t look at our support site because it was too large. Paradoxically this meant they missed out on the information even a confident IT user really did need – hence our 2 minute guide.
In developing the guide I decided to take the OER route as surely we were not the first to write such a thing. The nadir of this process was finding a 2 minute guide as a 5 minute video. However, in the end, old fashioned non OER
reuse was the solution – I asked permission and paraphrased something someone else in the Department had written.
So an everyday story of pragmatic reuse. Something I have recently been reminded about both in the context of our OER Impact work and our recent google analytics report which showed that the average time spent on the 2 minute guide page was 2.02 minutes – shall I let the person who originally wrote the content know?
Image: 1305 Seconds / Rob Lockhart / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0