The student, faculty, and staff member's capacity to share and give is deeply "grounded in the human attributes of creativity and desire, so that students can recognise themselves in a world of their own design" (Neary, 2009). The University of British Columbia's Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT) responds to this desire by supporting a wide range of open education efforts, from OER creation and MOOCs to Wikipedia projects and community sharing.
This presentation will attempt to bridge the too often divided "pro" or "against" camps of corporate MOOCs, LMSs, OER, and open technologies. It will explore the philosophy of successful open education projects and share practical advices of aligning vision, technology, people's skills and managerial practices to create an all-inclusive foundation for creating an unrestricted knowledge available for variety of usages.
UBC utilizes both third party technologies (edX, Blackboard) which are aligned with it's own self-hosted open source platforms. More than a collection of resources, the UBC Wiki, UBC CMS and UBC Blogs serve as a collaborative authoring and education platform for content that is republished on diverse sites across and beyond the institution. This process challenges previously locked-down university content management systems and processes, and empowers faculty, students, and staff to edit and share content to benefit the entire campus community in number of creative ways. The open and collaborative ethos has allowed users across the institution to frequently drive innovation, such as a Math Department initiative that constructs and reassembles learning resources using a flexible and powerful content model that exploits namespaces, transclusions, and categories and delivers content to smartphone apps. By practical application of this all-inclusive approach and philosophy, UBC has managed to impact not only its teaching and learning environment in very positive way but also improved website production and saved significant amounts of money that could be redirected towards teaching, learning, and research.
In addition to content and technology, management vision is important and often overlooked ingredient for a successful and widely adopted implementation of open learning. Confident managers at higher education institutions are willing to cede a measure of control in order to gain empowerment of their institution's people. This presentation will explore how open technologies, institutional vision, and managerial roles can empower the people (including students, staff, and faculty) to create, adopt, and share educational materials and practices.
