For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth. ~Plutarch? 

One of the most exciting evolution in pedagogy over the last few years is the integration of open education resources (OERs) and open practices into teaching and learning. During Open Access Week 2016, I had the pleasure and opportunity to lead a workshop on open pedagogy with my BCcampus Faculty Fellow colleagues at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU). I think I can speak for all of us when I say it was truly inspiring to see the administrative support of, faculty enthusiasm for, and student participation in the open education movement at KPU. We planned the workshop as a hands-on create your own open pedagogy project using the liberating structures activity Troika consulting. That rapidly turned into an illuminating group discussion about experiences integrating and developing OER.

Before we started the hands-on workshop, we presented an overview of open education, open science, and several lessons learned from our work integrating OER into new pedagogical approaches. Many of the examples came from work with my colleagues on Open Geography at UBC and on the authentic learning projects presented by our students’ open scholarship website.

These workshop slides on open pedagogy and open science are openly-licensed as CC BY 4.0. Download the slides here. We share these slides above in the hopes that they can be a resource for those of you interested in taking next steps in open pedagogy and stimulating discussion on open education. Many thanks to KPU Open Education for the invitation and special thanks to Caroline Daniels (KPU Library) and Rajiv Jhangiani for being such gracious hosts.

It was an honor to share my work on open pedagogy as a teaching strategy with the University of British Columbia Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology (@UBC_CTLT). They put together a little video vignette as part of their Open Dialogues that allowed me to (1) explain  the experiences that led me to become an advocate for Open Educational Resources (OER), (2) talk about the role of BCcampus in promoting OER in British Columbia, (3) define why OER are critical approaches to responsible pedagogy, and (4) reflect on what open pedagogy means to learners (and I include both “students” and myself as a “professor” in the category of learners).

Here is the CTLT post and video:

I have a long term itch to write about why open pedagogy matters for geography, environmental studies, and environmental sciences… but that will have to wait until after the the Association of American Geographers meeting in San Francisco and our presentation on using open science approaches for teaching Geographic Information Science.

By the way, I should also point out the presentations by my colleagues on our collaborative research on understanding the neoliberalization of pedagogy and the geography of teaching and learning (Turner) and on developing virtual reality and augmented reality field trip (Brown)! Here’s a taste of the virtual reality Sea-to-Sky field trip that we developed as an experiment using 360 cameras, Holobuilder, and Google Cardboard to increase field trip accessibility!