Sustainable infrastructure: Developing a re-usable toolkit for efficient online course design

Distance education has come a long since the days of mailed correspondence, with little interaction and a timely delay. As technology continues to more robustly offer opportunities for instructors and learners to be distributed but still interactive, more options for course structures emerge. Open online course development for distance education is a time consuming process that requires deep thought about personal pedagogical beliefs and an exploration of the technological tools available (for both development and for use in the course). This paper details the development of an online open course that features not only open access to course content and files, but also to the supporting resources that were used by the team involved in developing the course. These resources build what the authors are calling a "production toolkit," which can be put into action by any individual or team embarking on the development of their own course. This paper details the background of the project, an overview of the pedagogy that underpins the project, the tools used to produce the course, and the design decisions used during production. Though specific examples are used from the course, the design principles and resources presented can be used across projects.The course production was funded as part of the Engineering Education for Sustainable Cities in Africa, which was funded by the Dean’s Strategic Fund, Connaught Global Challenges Award, and Learning and Education Advancement Fund (LEAF). The resources mentioned in this paper are all licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License