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Open Education in Canada

In a recent University Affairs article, Suzanne Bowness offers some wonderful coverage of open education work in the Canadian context. While the title of the article focuses on “online textbooks” this piece is actually much more indepth than that surface level insight about open education. For example, this article:

Defines open education resources.
Identifies ways in which the open education movement is aiming to reimagine and democratize learning practices (and technologies).
Starts to flesh out the impacts of the important paradigm shift of moving from open education resources (OERs) to open education practices.
Identifies the new field of research examining perceptions, uses, costs, and other aspects of open education resources and open education practices.

The article identifies some of the strong contributions to advocacy that my colleagues (to name just a few @thatpsychprof, @amandacoolidge, @clintlalonde, @fdastur, @mctoonish, @maryeburgess, @lauriaesoph, @dendroglyph and @bccampus) have made to support open education practices in Canada. With so many people making excellent contributions, I was honored that Susan Bowness choose to cite my experience and work on open education. Here is an excerpt,

Professor Arthur Gill Green traces his conversion to using open educational resources, or OER, back to a specific day in his introductory geography class in 2010. That day, after the lecture, he noticed students taking photos at the back of the classroom and wondered why.
It turns out they were photographing the textbook. “Two of us every week get digital pictures of the textbook pages, and one of us gets to take it home,” a nervous student confessed upon Dr. Green’s approach. He reassured the students he wasn’t upset, but the professor now sees the incident as a disruptive moment.

“It made me realize that I was putting students into a position that was untenable, that they basically could not afford the books that I was choosing,” Dr. Green recalls. “I started to really think about my principles as a teacher. I came to the conclusion that I needed to find open education resources for my students, because if I was creating barriers to their learning, then I was violating my own core principles in my pedagogy.”

Fast forward several years and Dr. Green, an affiliate assistant professor at the University of British Columbia and instructor at Okanagan College, not only uses open educational resources, broadly defined as openly licensed teaching tools, he’s collaborating on two open geography textbooks and has developed a virtual field-trip app called Field Trip. Dr. Green has also become a research fellow for a working group on open educational resources at Utah’s Brigham Young University. Like many converts, Dr. Green sees the OER phenomenon as more than a consumer choice, but as a movement – one that is redefining his pedagogical approach to make his teaching more collaborative, inclusive and creative.

If you get a chance, give the article a read! I do believe that open education is about creating community, so contact me if you want to know more!

Open Pedagogy Workshop for Open Access Week 2016

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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.

Teaching in the Open: Open Pedagogy and Responsible Pedagogy

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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!