Open Education 2015

What are the differing, yet possibly overlapping, roles of faculty and students in advocacy and support for OER? In this presentation we will share our ideas and experiences on this question.

Christina Hendricks is a faculty member at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver, who served as a Faculty Fellow with the BCcampus Open Textbook Program during 2014-2015. She will share her experiences with advocating for OER and open textbooks with faculty, and her ideas for continuing to do so in the future, especially on a campus where a recent policy about sharing teaching materials has led a number of faculty members to be unwilling to share theirs. One of the significant problems Christina has run into so far is that holding workshops about open education, OER, open textbooks and inviting people to come means only those already interested will do so. She will speak about, among other things, efforts to try to re-frame those workshops to focus on pedagogy and bring open education in as a means to improve pedagogy.

Brady Wallace is an undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. Currently holding the position of Vice President University Relations on the Simon Fraser Student Society, he has been working for the past year with colleagues to encourage SFU faculty members to adopt OER's on campus. Through advocacy efforts both on and off campus, the 'BC Open Textbook Campaign' has garnered attention across the SFU community and reached other institutions within the Province. He will speak on the approaches used at SFU to get greater attention from all university stakeholders, what allies he has made within the university and the existing challenges in encouraging open textbook adoption.

Jenna Omassi and Daniel Munro are undergraduate students at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver, who serve as Vice-President, Academic and University Affairs and Associate Vice-President, Academic and University Affairs, respectively, for UBC's student union the Alma Mater Society. As of Spring 2015 they are starting to get involved in advocacy efforts around OER & open textbooks, and will be working more closely with Brady and Christina to plan activities starting in Fall 2015.

Though we can each speak to what we have done so far and/or hope to do, we will also focus on how students and faculty can work together in such efforts. While it can appear as if faculty have entire control over textbook decisions and students have little room for influence, students and faculty share many goals in regards to choices about course materials. Faculty would like students to access, read, interact with course materials, and many students would like to do so as well for the sake of their own learning, but are hindered by things such as cost, temporary access, inability to print or annotate digital files effectively, etc. The student perspective on the value of OER can be very effective in encouraging adoption, alongside that of faculty.