BC Open Textbook Summit 2017

Faced with a textbook with the sky upside down the power of a community collaboration and effort. We created a draft of an astronomy textbook that accurately reflected the faces and voices of the South African Astronomy community. What lessons from the Canadian Open Textbook community take from this?

How can we use the Canada150 celebration to accurately reflect student's lives and voices, images - this the real power of OER.

Kelsey Wiens is the Public Lead for Creative Commons Canada. Creative Commons is the global standard for legal sharing, used on over 1.1 billion works, with communities in over 100 countries. Kelsey has expertise in Open Educational Resources (OER), policymaking to support open collaboration and innovation, open business models, intellectual property law, and community building.

Kelsey is an open innovation practitioner. Kelsey spent 7 years working on open projects in Africa, living and working in Cape Town. Before returning to Canada in 2016 she managed pan-African projects with an open education focus, including the Pan-African Open Advocate Program #openafrica, Kumusha Bus stops, and Africa Toolkits. She is the founder of Open Textbooks for Africa, a project designed to support the adaption and adoption of Open Textbooks for universities across Africa. Previous projects include working with Siyavula the first CC licensed open textbook endorsed by a Board of Education globally, the Creative Commons Library Certificate Program, Nolwazi, WikiAfrica, University of Cape Town IP Unit, City of Cape Town Open Data Project, UNICEF Innovation Unit, and the Shuttleworth Foundation. She hosted the first African Open Textbook Summit in Cape Town, and CC's Institute for Open Leadership.

Kelsey was named one of South Africa’s brightest young minds by Mail & Guardian and was a speaker at 2015 TEDxCapeTown, on designing for trust.