BC Open Textbook Summit 2017

Ryan is Chief Executive Officer at Creative Commons. He joined the organization in 2014 to define a new strategy and to establish long-term sustainability for CC. Today, CC is implementing its renewed strategy to build a vibrant, usable commons powered by collaboration and gratitude. Since 2014, CC nearly tripled the number of individual donors, and the commons grew to over 1.1 billion licensed works. In early 2016, CC announced a landmark $10M donation from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, supporting its ongoing work and renewed focus.

Prior to joining CC, Ryan was Chief Operating Officer of Mozilla. He also worked as Director of Corporate Communications for the City of Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games, and was a Senior Advisor to Mayor David Miller in Toronto, where he led the Mayor’s budget policy and initiated Toronto’s Open Data project.

Estimates of the financial savings gained by students using open textbooks have become a critical data point for OER advocacy. For example, estimates of textbook financial savings are used to advocate for public and institutional investment in open education resources (OERs), to measure the success of existing open textbook repositories, and to advocate for institutional creation of “Z-degree” programs. Indeed, these financial savings estimates are often cited as the primary reason for adopting open textbooks as lowering costs is thought to lower barriers to formal and informal educational opportunities. Yet, the methods for calculating financial savings created by open textbooks vary widely. Many reported financial savings are simply educated guesses or “rule of thumb” estimates (e.g. each student adoption of an open textbook is calculated as $100 in savings, an amount that is neither inflation-adjusted over time nor based on any empirical data). Use of the above methods to estimate cost savings is scientifically unsound and could undermine OER advocacy. Noting these issues, there have been several recent attempts to gather empirical data on the cost of textbooks both within and across institutions and degrees programs. These empirical research efforts have adopted a dizzying array of methodologies and methodological assumptions.

In this presentation we argue it is vital that we examine the state of work around textbook costs so that we as researchers can provide accurate information to guide advocacy and policy. We examine (1) what we know about textbook costs and student choices, (2) what we know about textbook costs across degrees, (3) challenges in and assumptions of the current methods used to measure textbook costs, (4) a new method to measuring textbook costs, (5) a case study of using this new method to measure the cost of obtaining an Associate of Science or Associate of Arts degree in British Columbia.

Arthur Gill Green is a passionate advocate for and creator of open education resources (OERs). Green teaches geographic information science and environmental geography as a faculty member at the University of British Columbia and at Okanagan College. He believes that OER is a core component of responsible, open pedagogical approaches. He is an open textbook author and developer of open source educational software. He is also a 2016 BCcampus Open Textbook Faculty Fellow and a 2016-2017 Hewlett Foundation Open Education Research Fellow.

Jennifer Kirkey is a 2016-2017 BCcampus Faculty Fellow for Open Textbooks. She has taught physics and astronomy at Douglas College for 25 years. She has volunteered with Science World's Scientist in the School programs which involves running hands on workshops in elementary school classrooms. She is an active member of the local Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

In this presentation, I plan to share how we've executed a grass-roots strategy over the past two years to build openly licensed textbooks with almost no institutional funding or support at a large North American public research university. By harnessing open software (like Pressbooks and other WordPress plugins) and the goodwill of content experts here, we've managed to obtain consortium-level Pressbooks hosting through Unizin, develop procedures that allow any interested party on campus to create an open text, and form a Pressbooks user's group, despite almost no institutional funding (~$3500 USD in grants from our university so far). I'll give a brief overview of a handful of the 50+ active projects in development here which demonstrates some of the additional plugins we've integrated to extend the interactive capabilities of Pressbooks (H5P and hypothes.is, among others) and invites the audience to interact with these books. I will also describe our future development wishlist/roadmap, including our desire to instrumentalize Pressbooks/H5P to generate useful learning analytics that respect learners' privacy and develop a working LTI integration that will allow our texts to send grade reports to LMSes. My hope is that this presentation will serve both as encouragement to others trying to further open education goals at their institutions with little to no funding and attract a group of peers with similar goals to collaborate on a shared development plan (particularly in regards to learning analytics and LTI development).

Steel Wagstaff, Instructional Technology Consultant, UW-Madison

Join faculty members from the University of Victoria, British Columbia Institute for Technology, Mott College, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and the University of Saskatchewan as they discuss institutional strategies and support mechanisms for sustaining open education at their institutions.

Dr. Janni Aragon is an Academic Administrator with 19 years of teaching experience. In her role as Director of Technology Integrated Learning (TIL), she works closely with staff, faculty, librarians, students, and with support units across the University to support face-to-face, online, and flexible learning on campus. She currently serves as Co-Chair on the Open Education Resources Working Group and Chair of the Senate Committee on Learning and Teaching. She has extensive experience integrating technology with pedagogy and using open resources with her teaching.



Lin Brander works at BCIT Library where she is the Open Education Librarian, Collections Coordinator, and liaises with programs in the School of Energy. She is Co-Chair of the BCIT Open Education Working Group and a member of the BC Open Education Librarians (BCOEL) group.

Ken Jeffery is an instructor in the Digital Arts Department at BCIT and is a BCcampus Faculty Fellow for 2017. He is co-chair of the Open Education Working Group at BCIT, holds a Master’s Degree in Learning and Technology from Royal Roads University, and is a co-author of the open textbook Graphic Design and Print Production Fundamentals. With over 18 years of prior experience in visual communications, typography and design, Ken has a keen interest in how technology and openness converge to provide unrestricted access to all learners.

Farhad Dastur is a faculty member at Kwantlen Polytechnic University where he teaches evolutionary psychology, perception, and cognitive ergonomics. His research interests include sensory perception in pregnant women, the determinants of intersection collisions between motorcycles and cars, the role of anxiety in pattern perception, and open education. His involvement with openness spans teaching, research, scholarship, development, and advocacy and includes the following:
• Taught psychology using OpenStax and NOBA;
• Researched the efficacy of open vs. commercial textbooks;
• Selected as one of the Open Education Group’s 2016-18 OER Research Fellows
• Written a book chapter “How to Open an Academic Department;”
• Co-created an Intro Psychology course for the OERu; and
• Advocated for more openness at my institution and beyond
In 2017, he will be co-leading a field school into the Amazon rainforest to learn about its indigenous cultures and remarkable biodiversity.

Aaron Gulyas is a teacher, historian, and writer (generally in that order), Gulyas received his BA in History from Hanover College in 1998 as well as an MA in United States History from Indiana University-Indianapolis in 2003. He then moved into teaching, and has been at Mott Community College since 2006. His online courses include World History to 1500, World History to Present, American Military History, History of the Holocaust, and East Asia 1600 to Present. He also works with several of the college's curriculum and accreditation projects and is coordinator the college's OER efforts. Gulyas is the author of a number of articles and books on media history and criticism, science fiction, and fringe political cultures.

Heather M. Ross is an educational developer in the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Saskatchewan. She has been leading the open textbook and open pedagogy initiative at the U of S since 2014. She is also an OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group.

Nancy Turner is Director of the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning and Media Production at the University of Saskatchewan.  Her role as Director involves strategic leadership across her portfolio along with leading and contributing to institutional initiatives to enhance learning and teaching. Nancy returned to Saskatchewan to take up this position in 2013 after a decade working in London England. Her previous roles include Acting Dean and Associate Dean of Learning, Teaching and Enhancement at the University of the Arts London and Director of Educational Development at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work for the past 14 years has focused on strategic leadership of learning and teaching enhancement including initial and continuing professional development of faculty and graduate students, technology enhanced learning, reward and recognition for teaching, sustainability, student engagement in educational change, and open education. Her main areas of research are development of self belief, professional learning and change in higher education.

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.

This presentation will describe the results of a survey of 200 instructional faculty across 26 BC post-secondary institutions. The key questions this survey addresses include: 1) Who has a role in selecting required course materials, 2) What factors are more or less important to faculty when selecting course materials, 3) What is the relative importance to faculty of different ancillary resources, 4) How often do faculty hear from their students about requiring a textbook or using an older edition, 5) What is their awareness of OER and open textbooks, 6) How do faculty perceive the relative quality of open and commercial resources, and 7) How do each of these factors predict the likelihood of future adoption.

Dr. Rajiv S. Jhangiani
University Teaching Fellow and Psychology Instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University; Senior Open Education Advocacy & Research Fellow at BCcampus; Faculty Workshop Facilitator at the Open Textbook Network

Dr. Surita Jhangiani
Psychology Instructor at the Justice Institute of British Columbia and the University of British Columbia

SDG4 + OER: Working Together to Mainstream Open Education

The world’s nations have adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and committed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs

SDG4 is about “Education: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”

This session will explore how and why the global open education community can work with their national governments to mainstream OER (including open textbooks) in support of achieving SDG4.

Why connect OER to SDG4? (1) OER can be the education resources to teach the public about and are continuously updated by working on SDGs. (2) It would connect education institutions and people to solving SDGs, forming a new, positive connection between governments and their public education systems. (3) Global challenges / SDGs are constantly changing and OER can be updated in real time. (4) As learning spaces shift to open pedagogy, students can contribute to improving the open curriculum, work on complex and authentic SDG challenges, and have their work be used in their fields. (5) As working on SDGs is meaningful and the stakes are high (e.g., climate action, zero hunger, gender equality, no poverty, etc.), students are motivated to work smarter, learn more deeply, have an opportunity to contribute to society – by producing, revising, and sharing OER about SDGs - while they earn their degree.

Dr. Cable Green
Director of Open Education
Creative Commons

The Rebus Community is an effort to build a collaborative model for open textbook publishing. As of May, 2017 we are working on a dozen Open Textbook projects, with faculty and staff from more than 30 institutions. We’ll talk about where we’re at, what we’ve learned, where we’re going and how to get involved. (With invited guests from Rebus Community projects and partners TBD.)

Hugh McGuire has been building tools and communities that bring books onto the web for a decade. He is the co-founder of the Rebus Foundation, founder of Pressbooks, LibriVox, Pressbooks, and iambik. You can find him @hughmcguire.

The Open Educational Resources Universitas (OERu) is an international network of 37 tertiary institutions that have created free or reduced-fee-for-credit open educational courses. Both Kwantlen Polytechnic University and Thompson Rivers University are members of the OERu.The OERu partnership is now in its 4th year and has led to the creation of courses at both institutions that will be offered as part of the OERu course listings. Students will have access to learning materials free, with pathways to gain credentials, one of which is TRU's Certificate in General Studies. OERu is founded on the principle of community service and outreach to add value to traditional delivery systems in PSE. The foundation of OERu rests on the development and usage of open educational resources. This presentations will explain the history of TRU's role; will describe and demonstrate the OERu system. This presentation will discuss how that partnership supported the creation of these two courses with special reference to administrative leadership, policy development, library support services, and faculty involvement.

Brenda Thompson,
Associate Dean,
Faculty of Arts
Thompson Rivers University
Disciplinary Interest: adapting technology in communication courses.
Faculty member at TRU since 1998; former department chair for many years for Journalism, Communication, & New Media.

Diane Purvey
Dr. Diane Purvey is Dean, Faculty of Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She has served on several boards such as Strathcona Community Centre, the Surrey Public Art Advisory Committee plus hockey and soccer organizations. Dr. Purvey has a long record of volunteer community work and engagement in community-based research.
 
Prior to her employment with KPU, Dr. Purvey was Associate Professor and Chair of the School of Education, Faculty of Human, Social and Educational Development at Thompson Rivers University and Professor, Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences, Division of Education Studies, Royal Roads University. Dr. Purvey has a BA and an MA in History and a PhD in Social and Educational Studies from the University of British Columbia. She is the co-author and co-editor of three books on aspects of British Columbia's social history, the most recent being Vancouver Noir, 1930-1960.

Todd Mundle
Todd Mundle has been University Librarian at Kwantlen Polytechnic University since May 2012. Prior to that he served as Associate University Librarian at Simon Fraser 
University Library with responsibilities for Collections and Scholarly Communications and previously, for Library’s budget and personnel. He’s part of KPU’s Open Studies Working Group exploring all things open as well as promoting and creating awareness of open across the university. 
Throughout his career Mr. Mundle has had a keen interest in technology, copyright, and collection development; how they intersect and how they can be leveraged to provide wider access to information. He’s been an OA advocate since the early 2000s when he led BC’s first retrospective thesis digitization project making 4000+ theses publically available on the internet.

Rajiv Jhangiani
Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani is the University Teaching Fellow in Open Studies and a Psychology Instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, where he conducts research in open education and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Dr. Jhangiani serves as the Senior Open Education Advocacy and Research Fellow with BCcampus, an Associate Editor of Psychology Learning and Teaching, and a faculty workshop facilitator with the Open Textbook Network. His books include A Compendium of Scales for Use in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2015) and Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science (forthcoming, Ubiquity Press).

Farhad Dastur
I am a faculty member at Kwantlen Polytechnic University where I teach evolutionary psychology, perception, and cognitive ergonomics. My research interests include sensory perception in pregnant women, the determinants of intersection collisions between motorcycles and cars, the role of anxiety in pattern perception, and open education. My involvement with openness spans teaching, research, scholarship, development, and advocacy and includes the following:
• Taught psychology using OpenStax and NOBA;
• Researched the efficacy of open vs. commercial textbooks;
• Selected as one of the Open Education Group’s 2016-18 OER Research Fellows
• Written a book chapter, “How to Open an Academic Department;”
• Co-created an Intro Psychology course for the OERu; and
• Advocated for more openness at my institution and beyond
In 2017, I will be co-leading a field school into the Amazon rainforest to learn about its indigenous cultures and remarkable biodiversity.

Open pedagogy has multiple meanings and involves many different kinds of practices. In this session we will involve participants in a discussion of open pedagogy as well as showcase three different OER and open pedagogy projects. Christina Hendricks (UBC) will discuss the Open Case Studies project, which collects case studies written by professors and students, that are openly licensed for anyone to revise and reuse. Marianne Gianacopoulos (Langara) will share her experiences with international students in Post Degree Diploma programs, who are moving past the traditional textbook and Learning Management System to build skills that will serve them beyond the classroom walls. Michael Dabrowski (Athabasca) will discuss a project involving a collaboration between 6 Western Canadian Universities, including professors, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as members of the Canadian Hispanic community, to engage in open collaborative pedagogy/andragogy to take students beyond the core subject matter of courses.

Initiated separately by many members of our department, with various individual reasons and motivations, the Department of Mathematics at UBC has developed and integrated a variety of open course resources and textbooks into our first and second year math courses that have impacted many thousands of students.

As a mathematical biologist, I felt that default calculus course was not very appropriate for life science students. I will describe one effort that has been invested in designing, creating, and evolving Life-Science-specific open resources directed at a 1st year sequence of calculus courses (Math 102-103), from its inception to recent experiences in the classroom. Aside from an open book, we have assembled flexible learning technologies that include videos, online homework (WebWork), and multi-stage quizzes, and others.

I will also briefly survey several independent ventures by my colleagues that are all directed at customizing the syllabus of courses they teach, helping the students avoid costly texts, and offering a range of material for student learning.

Leah Keshet is a Professor in the Dept of Mathematics at UBC, where she has been a faculty member since 1989, teaching, carrying out research, supervising graduate students, and helping with departmental administrative duties. She is the author of two traditional published books in Mathematical Biology, and former president of the Society for Mathematical Biology. She has been developing curriculum for first year calculus suitable for Life-Science students since the 1990’s, and continues to be involved, with other colleague in her department, in developing that course to this day.

This session will present a case study of the adoption of an open textbook Introduction to Sociology – 2nd Canadian Edition in a first year sociology course at one Canadian university in the fall of 2016. The instructor involved was experienced with the course, having made the decision to change the textbook after a conversation with staff from the institutional teaching and learning centre. Support (financial and human) was provided to enable the creation and open release of ancillaries (a text bank) that allowed for the textbook adoption. 

An existing open textbook survey (Jhangiani, Dastur, Le Grand, & Penner, under review) was adapted and distributed electronically to all students in the course. A 34% response rate (n=120/351) to the survey was achieved, providing valuable feedback for both the instructor and staff at the teaching and learning centre regarding their views of the specific textbook, print vs. digital preferences, and how the use of this resource sat in contrast to their experiences in other courses. Completion rates and average student grades for this course compared to previous offerings will also be presented.

Key implications of these findings for the instructor, the teaching and learning centre and the institution will be presented and discussed.

References
Jhangiani, R. S., Dastur, F., N., Le Grand, R., & Penner, K. (under review). As good or better than commercial textbooks: Students’ perceptions and outcomes from using open digital and open print textbooks.

Heather M. Ross

Heather M. Ross is an educational developer in the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Saskatchewan. She has been leading the open textbook and open pedagogy initiative at the U of S since 2014. She is also an OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group.

Nancy Turner

Nancy Turner is Director of the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning and Media Production at the University of Saskatchewan.  Her role as Director involves strategic leadership across her portfolio along with leading and contributing to institutional initiatives to enhance learning and teaching. Nancy returned to Saskatchewan to take up this position in 2013 after a decade working in London England. Her previous roles include Acting Dean and Associate Dean of Learning, Teaching and Enhancement at the University of the Arts London and Director of Educational Development at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work for the past 14 years has focused on strategic leadership of learning and teaching enhancement including initial and continuing professional development of faculty and graduate students, technology enhanced learning, reward and recognition for teaching, sustainability, student engagement in educational change, and open education. Her main areas of research are development of self belief, professional learning and change in higher education.

The Libretexts is an OER collaborative platform to enable dissemination and evaluation of new education developments and approaches, with an emphasis on data driven assessment of student learning and performance via a freely available online infrastructure. The Libretexts was recently expanded to 12 pseudo–independently operating and interwoven libraries covering 12 academic fields to function as a central platform for the construction and implementation of post-secondary OER textbooks. Since its inception eight years ago, the LibreTexts has been exponentially growing and is the most visited chemistry website in the world with 30 other participating campuses and over $3M of student textbook savings to date. This presentation addresses our recently expansion efforts and the next “next-gen” phase of development to integrate emerging education technologies into the content.

Delmar Larsen
Associate Professor
Founder and Director of the LibreTexts libraries
Department of Chemistry
University of California, Davis

From the University of Victoria: The presenters had successfully funded BC Campus Open Textbook grants and will speak to their process, progress, pitfalls, and overall help attendees with storyboarding their open textbook efforts. This workshop will focus on our experiences with open textbooks and will share key takeaways and advice on implementing a successful open textbook project. The goal of this project is to provide textbook options that offer students flexible and affordable access. Specifically, using current open textbook projects at the University of Victoria as examples, we will discuss lessons learned regarding open textbook creation and adaptation; copyright and creative commons; pedagogical activities involving open textbooks and open pedagogy, and tips for project planning.

From Kwantlen Polytechnic University: In this session, faculty OER grantees from KPU will describe their innovative projects, ranging from building an online course with the City of Surrey to increase awareness and understanding of dementia to using virtual world technology to foster student success. The presenters, all of whom are relative newcomers to OER, will describe their motivations and offer insights into their process.

Presenters from UVIC:
Dr. Janni Aragon is an Academic Administrator with 19 years of teaching experience. In her role as Director of Technology Integrated Learning (TIL), she works closely with staff, faculty, librarians, students, and with support units across the University to support face-to-face, online, and flexible learning on campus. She currently serves as Co-Chair on the Open Education Resources Working Group and Chair of the Senate Committee on Learning and Teaching. She has extensive experience integrating technology with pedagogy and using open resources with her teaching. 

Inba Kehoe is Copyright Officer and Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Victoria Libraries, British Columbia. She is a graduate of U of Toronto and has recently started working on a PhD at the University of Victoria. Inba's interests include author rights, scholarly publishing and open scholarship.

Dr. Mariel Miller is an Educational Designer and Manager of the Department of Technology Integrated Learning (TIL). In her role at TIL, she works with instructors and staff on initiatives for teaching and learning with technology. Mariel’s background is in Educational Psychology and her research and professional interests focus on leveraging technology to support student regulation of learning as a dynamic and social process. In her own teaching, she strives to integrate teaching with pedagogy and experiment with open resources.

Presenters from KPU:

Judith DeGroot
Instructor, Health Care Assistant Program


Nick Inglis
Instructor, Biology

In order to remain faithful to the tenets of the open textbook movement, careful thought must be given to how they are published, distributed, and especially to how they are authored. Popular authoring tools, such as Word and iBooks Author, require the writing and styling of documents to happen simultaneously. This paradigm restricts authors to publish their content in the formats those tools are specifically designed for. Word restricts authors to paper-based formats, and iBooks Author is limited to eBook formats. By separating content from its formatting, authors free themselves of the restrictions imposed by these tools and allow themselves to write their content once, and then publish it in any format they choose.

Plain text files allow for this separation of content and formatting. Furthermore, they are platform independent and lend themselves to version control, which allows authors to collaborate and record the provenance of their contributions. True to the five Rs of openness, plain text files are ubiquitously editable. The most simple of text editors are included in all major operating systems and the most popular, fully-featured text editors are free of cost and are themselves open source.

In this workshop, participants will hear the full, yet brief, case for authoring open textbooks in plain text using the minimalistic markup syntax, Markdown. The workshop will begin with a personal anecdote, including the motivation for investigating Markdown; however, the bulk of the time will be spent learning the Markdown syntax using tools already installed on participants' computers or alternative web-based editors. Participants will then have the opportunity to beta test a web-based conversion tool developed by the University of Oklahoma Libraries. This web app, as well as the entire workflow being proposed, was specifically designed with open textbook authors in mind to facilitate their easy authorship of quality, archivable, maintainable, democratized information.

Cody Taylor has been developing open educational resources for OU Libraries since January of 2014 and has been an emerging technologies librarian since June of 2016.  Cody holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from OU and is a certified Software Carpentry instructor. He is interested in embedded electronics, prototyping, open source hardware and software,  and makerspaces.

Policy can play an important role in advancing the creation, adoption and sustainability of open educational resources. At both the government and institutional levels, policy can affect important factors such as how resources like funding and staff are allocated, what goals and priorities are set, and what kind of activities are encouraged. Policymakers themselves can also be important allies, using their influence to raise awareness, call for action, or clear barriers.

This workshop will explore the ways that open textbooks and open educational resources intersect with policy at the institutional, state/provincial, and national levels, and how members of the audience can get involved in developing, passing and implementing policies. It will be broken into three parts:

Part 1: Overview of government OER policy, including examples from the U.S. and Canada, and tips for advocacy.

Part 2: Overview of OER policy at the institutional level, including examples and a tool for building your own institutional policy.

Part 3: The room will then split up into small groups to each develop an OER policy idea, then share their plan back with the group.

Executive Director, Aboriginal Initiatives and Partnerships, effective January 18, 2016. Kory comes to BCIT most recently from Vancouver Community College where she served as Director, Aboriginal Education and Community Engagement since 2011. Kory is Chair of the National Indigenous Education Committee of Colleges and Institutions Canada and a Global Access to Post-Secondary Education Ambassador. Kory has a law degree from UBC.

With over 20 years of experience in post-secondary education, community development, and the legal profession, Kory’s passion lies “in ensuring success for Aboriginal Learners and other multi-barriered learners”. She has a deep commitment to education and has dedicated her working life to ensuring that under-represented learners succeed, both within learning institutions and the larger community.

Kory is a member of the We Wai Kai Nation (Quadra Island) and is Musgamagw Tsawataineuk and Laich-Kwil-Tach. Both nations are part of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation, also known as the Kwak’wala speaking people.

For many student leaders, finding ways to make a post-secondary degree more affordable is a top priority. Many student leaders have heard about the benefits of OER, but may not be aware of the tactics needed to actually transition their campus to OER. In recognition of this, this workshop will provide attendees with an overview of how grassroots organizing can be applied to OER advocacy. Separated into two halves, the first half of the session will provide an overview of what grassroots organizing is and how student leaders have been successful with such approaches, while the second half will provide attendees with the opportunity to think through how grassroots organizing can be applied in their own context. Bringing together both student leaders new to OER as well as those with experience, this session will provide attendees with the opportunity to connect, learn from one another and commit to further action that can be taken on their campuses through grassroots organizing.

Presenter: Nicole Allen is the Director of Open Education for SPARC. Nicole leads SPARC's work on Open Education, including advocating for U.S. federal and state policy, supporting on-campus efforts to advance OER through academic libraries, and international advocacy for open education through the Open Government Partnership. Nicole has been working to advance open education for over ten years and has a background in grassroots organizing and policy advocacy.

Presenter: Brady Yano is the Assistant Director of Open Education for SPARC. In this role he provides support and leads special projects across SPARC’s Open Education portfolio. Brady was first introduced to OER while serving as a student leader at Simon Fraser University. Recognizing the benefits that greater OER adoption would bring, he organized the "#textbookbrokeBC" campaign with fellow BC student leaders. Chat with Brady about OER, libraries and student advocacy.

Presenter: Kaitlin (Katie) Steen is the Open Education Fellow at SPARC . Katie has a long history in student advocacy and has worked on higher education policy at both the state and federal level.

Over the past two years with the support of Open School BC, Camosun College has developed 23 open textbooks and a number of ancillary resources for Trades training. The digital distribution of open textbooks allow for a seamless integration of multimedia learning assets which can enrich both teaching and learning.

At Camosun we have developed several interactive “games” to allow students to practice assembling scaffolding and to use and read several measurement devices. 

In this workshop Camosun’s development team will introduce participants to some of the concepts utilized in designing and developing these assets. Participants will get hands-on experience in an interactive workshop, in which they will demonstrate how to build additional exercises for a Multimeter learning asset.  Individuals who the appropriate computer resources will be able to build their own activities both in and after the workshop. As well, we will present on how Camosun is maximizing the use of open resources for trades training.  We will also look at the interdisciplinary approach we have taken at our institutions which involves faculty, students, staff and external partnerships.

Sarah-Jayne McAndrew Roe
Sarah-Jayne is a Continuing Education instructor and employee at Camosun College.  She has worked on a variety of different programs, most recently on the delivery of essential skills training and development of a blended learning trades program at Camosun. Sarah has a BA Honours in Fine Arts from Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education from the University of Sunderland.


Matthew Zeleny
Matt Zeleny is an Applied Research Specialist at Camosun Innovates and in Camosun’s Technology Access Centre.  He works on numerous projects for industry involving 3D scanning, reverse engineering, prototyping and CAD design. Matt has a wide range of knowledge and experience in the areas of 3D scanning technologies and processes, non-conventional silicone moulding and the creation and utilization of 3D printed parts.  Matt also works with faculty from Camosun’s Pipe Trades and technology student interns to create open learning ancillary resources.  Matt is a graduate from Camosun’s Engineering Graphics Technician program and a Certified Solidworks Professional,

Hebron Watson
Hebron Watson is an international student from the Bahamas studying Computer Science Technology at Camosun.  When not studying, he is also an intern at Camosun Innovates and works on open resource projects.

The Royal Roads MA degree in Learning and Technology has been redesigned, and features openness and networked learning as key design principles. In this presentation we describe faculty experiences with designing and developing for, and in, an open learning environment. Faculty experiences described center around support requirements, tensions with designing/developing for openness, and concerns with providing safe learning environments. We conclude with recommendations for supporting faculty in designing for open learning spaces.

table { }td { padding-top: 1px; padding-right: 1px; padding-left: 1px; color: black; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; font-family: Calibri; vertical-align: bottom; border: medium none; white-space: normal; } If open educational resources are to truly compete with commercial publishers, we must provide a full set of open capabilities that support a book.  Publishers provide learning resources in a learning object repository (LOR) that allows remixing and easy integration into learning management systems using protocols like LTI.  Publishers provide learning resources like slides, assignment, and interactive software to help those who use the book.  Every open book should also have a truly free and open MOOC associated with the book that does not depend on any institutional LMS or MOOC hosting provider.  We need the ability to have a OER website for a book, a "LOR of my Own", an "LMS of my Own" and a "MOOC of my Own" using only our locally owned and controlled resources.  The tsugi.org project in effect is the WordPress for Open Education.  By downloading, configuring, and hosting a simple PHP application augmented by free content delivery networks, it is possible to deploy a scalable worldwide MOOC with surprisingly low cost.  This presentation will introduce the tsugi.org software and show how it is used to build sites like www.py4e.com.

Charles R. Severance
University of Michigan

bio: http://dr-chuck.com/dr-chuck/resume/index.htm

The movement for OER in Canada and the United States has been accelerating, with numerous institutions launching initiatives to support the creation, adoption, adaptation and awareness of OER. While there are a number of successful efforts to organize networks, communities, and consortia, many activities also happen organically without visibility outside their institution. Recognizing the need to better track and share information about the efforts institutions have taken to advance OER, SPARC has developed the Connect OER Project. While the anticipated launch of this project is not until September 2017, this 30-minute presentation will provide attendees with a first-hand opportunity to learn more about the project, our initial findings and how their institution can get involved.

Brady Yano is the Assistant Director of Open Education for SPARC. In this role he provides support and leads special projects across SPARC’s Open Education portfolio. Brady was first introduced to OER while serving as a student leader at Simon Fraser University. Recognizing the benefits that greater OER adoption would bring, he organized the "#textbookbrokeBC" campaign with fellow BC student leaders. Chat with Brady about OER, libraries and student advocacy.

The BC Open Education fellows will present on OER adoption trends in BC (by institution and by discipline) from 2012-2017, including eight specific patterns of individual and group adoptions.

Pressbooks, an open source book publishing platform, is getting used by more and more Open Textbook projects, and this is by far the most interesting (to us!) use for Pressbooks. In this talk, Hugh McGuire (founder of Pressbooks) will talk about why Open Textbooks offer such exciting technical possibilities. He’ll give an overview of the Pressbooks development roadmap, with a focus on Open Textbooks-specific features. The talk will cover things like: making it easy to find openly licensed Pressbooks books, about making reusing, revising & remixing easy, about accessibility, annotations, and making better web interfaces for books. 

If all goes well we'll demo with everyone the ease of remixing using Pressbooks.

Hugh McGuire has been building tools and communities that bring books onto the web for a decade. He is the co-founder of the Rebus Foundation, founder of Pressbooks, LibriVox, Pressbooks, and iambik. You can find him @hughmcguire.

Lumen Learning began working with institutions to replace traditional textbooks with OER in May 2011. More than five years later we have seen a many successes and failures, but more importantly, gained insight into the factors the have a measurable impact (good and bad) on student learning.

This presentation will present insights from along the road, and engage participants in exploring how we might expand and refine OER adoption to better support students and faculty to increase learning.

Kim Thanos, Co-founder and CEO, Lumen Learning

Based on the experiences of the OpenStax Institutional Partner Program and partnering schools, this workshop will provide participants with a strategic plan outline and strategies to greatly increase faculty use of OER on their campuses. Through group and individual activities, participants will learn the criteria for writing and implementing effective strategies, how to track the effectiveness of each strategy, how to time strategies so they have the most impact, and how to pull it all together to create into an effective plan.

As managing director, Daniel guides OpenStax in saving students across the country millions of dollars. He has dedicated the past ten years of his life to developing education startups from conception to culmination, with specialties in open education, content development, ed-tech, consumer intelligence, management, and quality assurance.

This presentation will describes the outcome of an ongoing, self-sustaining project at Athabasca University that has produced significant financial savings for the institution, maintained equivalent student learning outcomes and persistence rates, and at the same time enhanced aspects of the learning experience for students in introductory financial accounting. Broadly-applicable conclusions about the factors encouraging OER adoption can be drawn from the success of the project to date. These illuminate organizational issues that impede the adoption of OER and how the rate of OER adoption in the academy could be increased.

David Annand, EdD, MBA, CPA, CA is a Professor of Accounting in the Faculty of Business. His research interests include the study and development of open education resources, and the organization of online- and distance-based universities.

Textbooks are vital to many approaches to curriculum development, but building one requires creating a significant amount of content. This can be time consuming to write, expensive to acquire externally, or both.

However, textbooks don't necessarily always need to be planned and written from the ground up. Sometimes it may be appropriate to take advantage of existing openly licensed content that can be repurposed to serve as textbooks.

This presentation will consider Wikipedia as an underappreciated treasure trove of such freely reusable learning objects, and demonstrate how its Book Creator tool be used by open educational resources developers, whether in cooperation to increase the number of textbooks generally available to all, or to create on a case by case basis for specific needs that arise.

Steve Foerster is President of New World University. With two decades of expertise in technology, management, and education, Mr Foerster is dedicated to building educational ecosystems that maximise access to higher education for underserved populations.

Vincent Kizza is Executive Director of the Free Curricula Centre at New World University. A trained mathematician and computer scientist, Prof Kizza has been active in the open education movement for a decade, promoting education as a tool for economic development both in Uganda and throughout the world.

Join us in a final wrap up sessions where we provide a synposis of the event and suggest next steps and a call to action for the attendees.