The FOSSA Blog

Launching today: The FOSSA Learning website and “FOSSA 101” - a project and a course to make learning design more free, open, small, simple and accessible

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This is a project I’ve been pondering for a few years now. Today, I’m happy to share it with everyone - from instructional designers to educational publishers, and keen lifelong learners as well. So what is FOSSA Learning - and why should you care?

Five reasons why: FOSSA as an EdTech cry for help

In 2020, when digital learning was quickly looking to shift gears and respond to the pandemic, I was telling myself that everything I’m doing is “unprecedented”. Yes, we were using strange tools and processes, but we were in a rush. No, this wasn’t the best way to build that course, but we were keen to be the first to market. We should have absolutely planned a different thing, but planning was a luxury. And so on. I know I was not alone in that: many of my fellow editors, authors and learning designers felt like things got fast and wild all around them.

I kept thinking that things would settle down. They did, and they didn’t.

FOSSA was something I started thinking about because of what I feared losing among the sudden rush. I saw the price hikes, the cash flow jitters, the impatience to make a profit in e-learning - and that is why I mourned the free learning which started disappearing. I saw products locking people into one walled garden after another - so I feared that a day would come when no open formats were available. I saw products whose download sizes broke my (respectable) broadband connection: this was why I remembered learning from tiny, self-contained software.

To be clear, this was not an either-or situation in my head.

I believe that we can build learning experiences of all shapes, sizes, and flavours. Expensive ones and free ones. Huge ones and tiny ones. Courses with complex academic language and courses written in elegant layman’s terms.

FOSSA exists because I felt that, all around me, that other side of the story was being forgotten. Our plans, software, budgets, skills - they were all pushing us towards the biggest, flashiest, most complex Learning Things we could afford. We weren’t thinking “small”, or “free”, or “simple” - why would we?

I didn’t want to lose the skills that came with that part of the territory. So I thought, and read, and thought some more.

Then I built FOSSA. Here it is.

What is FOSSA, and how it works

FOSSA is a set of five Experiments in response to five Problems. Each Experiment is a job of work. Each of them also comes with a Test: you’ll know you’re done when your work passes the Test.

The problems are not new, and I mentioned them just now. They describe reasons why your learners may choose not to use your learning products (or reasons why they feel they haven’t even got a choice but to avoid them).

The experiments are invitations to fix things. I don’t know what you’re building, so I can’t recommend exact procedures. They might not work. They might work better than I thought. Or they might help you find (and fix) a whole new problem along the way. That’s why they’re called “experiments” - so that you can find out why, and how, your e-learning could work better.

The tests are how I suggest you measure the experiments’ success. I tried to pick things we’re mostly familiar with. But I’m not dead-set on any of these. If you think you have a better yardstick to use, please do so.

That’s the idea behind the whole of FOSSA, by the way. You can aim to fix all five problems, or just some of them, or these five and then some more. You can devote years to all of these, or a six-hour caffeine-fueled workshop to just one of them. You can share the results by revising your main offering, or by providing an alternative.

There is no FOSSA police, no FOSSA badge of honour, no FOSSA certification. Take it and run with it; I hope you have fun.

“FOSSA 101” - an introduction to learning design using FOSSA Experiments

Alongside this website, I’m also happy to be launching “FOSSA 101”. This is a short online resource which gives you more information about FOSSA.

Each of the Problems and Experiments is presented in more detail, so you can start working on your chosen area with more confidence.

There are also some practical ideas to get started, and checklists for working on new and existing e-learning projects.

The course (and this whole website!) was built using the FOSSA way: it is free, open, small, and accessible. (I am still editing the language to meet the “Simple” part.)

You are free to use, remix, and share it - look for the Creative Commons license details in the footer of this page.

How to get involved

This website will always be here as a starting point for the project.

It has my contact details (look for them in the footer). I’d love to hear about your FOSSA work and any ideas it made you think of.

Good luck!

I’m super excited to be sharing this with you. I believe that every little bit of work done on any of the FOSSA Experiments can bring more joy and energy to your e-learning.

Here’s to your success.

All best,

Vic

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"Fossa leap!" by San Diego Shooter is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/?ref=openverse.