OpenLearn OER (Re)Publishing the Text Way

In response to a provocation, I built a thing that will let you grab an OpenLearn unit, convert it to a simple text format, and publish it on your own website.

[For the next step in this journey, see: Appropriating OpenLearn Content and Republishing Edited Versions Of It Via a “Simple” Automated Text Blogging Workflow.]

It doesn’t require much:

• if you haven’t got one already, create a Github account (just don’t “ooh, Github, that’s really hard, so I won’t be able to do it…”; just f***ing get an account);
• visit my repo and read down the page to see what to do…

And what to do essentially boils down to:

• press a BIG GREEN BUTTON to grab your a copy of the repo;
• raise an issue, which is to say: click a BIG GREEN button, copy and paste Fetch https://www.open.edu/openlearn as the title, and an OpenLearn course unit URL (if it ends in content-section-overview-0 or content-section-overview-0?SOMETHING it should work) as the first line in the issue body; for example: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/visions-protest-graffiti/content-section-0?active-tab=description-tab
• PRESS THE BIG GREEN BUTTON TO SUBMIT THE ISSUE;
• go to your repo’s Github Pages website. For a repo at https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/YOUR_REPO this will be https://YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME.github.io/YOUR_REPO and after a few minutes and a page refresh or or two you should see your website there. If it doesn’t appear, check the README for a possible fix.

As for changing the content – it’s not that hard once you’ve done it a few times and just go with the flow of writing what feels natural… “Easy” to edit text files are in the content directory and you can edit them via the Github website.