Documentation:CTLT programs/Open Education

What is generally meant by Open Education is the free sharing of ideas, practices, knowledge, and everything else related to learning between students, instructors, and institutions. Spurred by the need to make education accessible to all, the Open Education movement gained ground as the Internet evolved to enable easy sharing of different forms of media. From PDFs of a syllabus, to videos of lectures, to a slideshow of a student’s presentation, to a whole textbook accessible online, these educational resources are freely available for anyone to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. Many of these open educational resources are under different levels of Creative Commons licenses.

The Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology supports Open Education in various ways. UBC Blogs, UBC CMS and the UBC Wiki have been used as an open course management systems for many different open courses. The CTLT worked with the UBC Copyright Office to create Open Course & Educational Resource Guidelines OER and Creative Commons copyright guidelines. As UBC’s representative on the organizing committee, CTLT helped host the 2009 and 2012 Open Education Conferences at the Robson Square Campus. With more than 200 on-site attendees, and hundreds more following along online, the events attracted a diverse range of delegates from every single continent in the world.

For more resources and examples of open education at UBC, check out open.ubc.ca or UBC's e-Learning Toolkit.

For more information about this communities' past activities, or to connect with others interested in Open Education, please contact will.engle at ubc.ca.