Documentation:Open UBC/Open for Learning/Presentations

The following are openly-licensed slides and resources from open education workshops that have been held at UBC.

Finding, Using, and Adapting Open Resources For Your Courses

Session Description

Not all online course content needs to be created from scratch. As you prepare for your courses, chances are you may want to incorporate educational resources such as images, videos or quiz questions from different sources into your own materials. There are millions of openly licensed resources, from full courses and textbooks to tests banks and images, that are available for others to freely use. These resources can be modified and adapted to be more useful for your own teaching or learning context. This session is intended to address common questions concerning openly licensed materials for teaching and learning, including:

How do you find and evaluate open resources?
What is meant by Creative Commons?
What are the key considerations in reusing, reproducing, or modifying these materials?

With the proliferation of open education resources on the web, the practice of finding, evaluating, using, and remixing videos, simulations, test banks, presentations, and other materials is a skill that can help support instructors and students in their teaching and learning. This session will focus on the pragmatic elements of reuse and the basics of working with open education resources. Participants are invited to bring their questions, problems and favourite resources.

Resources

Using the UBC Wiki to Enhance Student Learning Through Open Assignments

Session Description

The UBC Wiki is an excellent tool that can enable student collaboration, host online discussions and support open assignments that involve students as co-creators of knowledge and learning resources. This session explores different approaches to using the UBC Wiki for courses, including supporting open assignments, best practices for course and project organization, and enabling student collaboration.

Resources

Teaching Remotely with Care: Introduction to Accessible Online Courses and Open Educational Resources (OER)

Session Description

In the last few months, educators across the globe have been struggling to figure out how to deliver their content to their students, how to assess them, how to connect with them and how to ensure they are safe. One of the priorities that might have been missing from our efforts is to ensure that our course content and educational resources are accessible to all our learners, regardless of any physical limitations that they might have. In this workshop, we will talk about design practices that can help ensure online course content and open educational resources are more versatile and useful for all students. Learn about useful processes, resources, and tips for getting started with accessibility. Designing for accessibility is a must and benefits all learners.

Resources

Digital, Micro, Open: Badges in Higher Education

Session Description

An educational badge is a digital symbol that signifies concrete evidence of a student’s accomplishments, skills, qualities, or participation in experiences (Educause, 2012). A growing number of post-secondary institutions across North America are incorporating educational badges into program and course curriculum. According to the research, when curriculum includes the opportunity to attain one or more educational badges, students are more engaged and motivated to develop the corresponding skills and abilities and are able to display their educational badge(s) on their LinkedIn account, website and/or e-portfolio providing visible evidence of educational achievement, thus increasing their employability. This interactive session will engage in an honest discussion about the pragmatic considerations for designing and implementing educational badges or badge programs.

Can I Use This? Finding and Working with Open Educational Resources (OER)

Session Description

If you are preparing resources for your teaching, from PowerPoint slides to online modules, chances are you’ll want to incorporate readings, images, video clips, problem sets, or other materials from different sources. There are millions of openly licensed resources, from full courses and textbooks to tests banks and images, that are available for others to freely use. This session will focus on the pragmatic elements of reuse and the basics of working with open educational resources (OER) that are licensed to allow revision and reuse. Such openly-licensed resources can impact teaching and learning through contextualization, time savings, and lowering student access barriers such as costs.

Are you interested in learning how to find reusable materials for your teaching? This session is intended to address common questions concerning openly licensed materials for teaching and learning. Some of these questions include:

What is meant by Creative Commons?
Where do you find open resources?
How do you evaluate open resources?
What are the key considerations in reusing, reproducing, or modifying these materials?

Participants are invited to bring their questions, needs, and favourite resources.

Open Educational Practices: Teaching with Wikipedia

Session Description

Teaching with Wikipedia transforms a classroom’s boundaries. Every day, students write papers, translate articles, or share photos with their class. Wikipedia assignments transform that classroom into a global audience. Students learn, and then share that learning in their own words, for real readers.” Wikieducator

Wikipedia-based assignments can engage students in an authentic learning experience that involves open collaboration, critical thinking, and knowledge building for a global audience. When students write or edit in Wikipedia, they are not using the same format or skills that they would in writing a research paper or persuasive essay – they are applying new strategies to produce knowledge that people will use in the real world and they are building digital literacies. Please join us for a hands-on introduction to engaging with Wikipedia in the classroom, including:

Considerations about challenges and opportunities when we ask students to work in the open
Overview of Wikipedia history and culture
Wikipedia assignments best practices and editing how to’s

Supporting Open Teaching and Learning Practices at UBC

Session Description

Open teaching and learning practices at UBC ranges from the use of open textbooks to students creating learning objects to share with future classes and the public (using various media). These rich learning experiences can offer faculty, students and staff new ways of approaching their teaching and learning and offer a different way of conceptualizing the role of the learner in the production of knowledge. Through open teaching and learning, faculty and students have the opportunity to contribute to a body of knowledge rather just consumers of information. Do you support instructors in open teaching and learning? Are you interested in sharing your experiences and learning different approaches to open teaching?

Tension and Risk in Open Scholarship: A Conversation

Session Description

Note: This 2017 Open Access Week event was a collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU), University of British Columbia (UBC), BCcampus, BCIT and took place on October 26, 2017.

We use “open” as though it is free of ideology, ignoring how much “openness,” particularly as it’s used by technologists, is closely intertwined with “meritocracy” — this notion, a false one, that “open” wipes away inequalities, institutions, biases, history, that “open” “levels the playing field.” -Audrey Waters, From Open to Justice

Spurred by the need to make research and education accessible to all, the open movement has gained ground as the Internet evolved to enable easy sharing of different forms of media and scholarship. Open practices are enabling faculty, staff and students at educational institutions in British Columbia and beyond to reduce barriers to research and education by opening their classrooms, incorporating new resources and perspectives, broadly sharing their data, and contributing to public knowledge. But the adoption of open scholarship cannot be assumed to free of biases and conflicts, and the impacts of open practices can differ depending on the context of those practices. Unaddressed tensions caused by “openness” can lead scholars, students, and community members to feel alienated, exploited, or unheard. Unexamined risks can lead to unintended outcomes for any open endeavours.

Within these intersections lies an opportunity for open scholarship: to directly examine and acknowledge the tensions and risks inherent in openness, and to thereby create a space in which dialogue is generated and understanding of openness is deepened.

Please join UBC, SFU and BCIT in celebrating International Open Access Week for a panel that examines the threads running through different tensions in the open movements, including:

Indigenous & Traditional Knowledge: Open scholarship may not be respectful of community authority, ownership, and norms of knowledge sharing.
Ethics and Privacy: Open scholarship may complicate the impacts of human participants in research, retrospective digitization, and students’ right to privacy.
Student-faculty relationships: Affordability conversations around open educational resources may lead to tensions around faculty motivation to provide the best learning resources. Open pedagogies can create risks for students: are they supported and what rights do they have in terms of their privacy, copyright, and consent?
Accessibility and inclusivity: Open practices may lead to digital redlining for individuals and communities and may not be truly accessible for everyone.
Instructor-Institution relationships: Open practices may allow the appropriation of instructors’ and adjuncts’ work putting their value at risk.

Video Presentation

Panelists included:

Amanda Coolidge (BCcampus)
Jessica Gallinger (SFU Library)
Christina Illnitichi (AMS, UBC)
David Gaertner (First Nations and Indigenous Studies, UBC)
Lisa Nathan (School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies, UBC)
Sue Doner, Camosun College

Open Educational Practices: Aligning Teaching and Learning with Research Practices

Session Description

Open educational practices include sharing teaching and learning materials with an open license, offering courses that are open to participants beyond the walls of a campus classroom, as well as inviting students to contribute to knowledge that is shared publicly. This session focuses in particular on the student as producer pedagogical model, which emphasises the role of the student as collaborator in the production of knowledge. In this model, the university’s approaches to learning and research are closer aligned; for example, students, similar to researchers, are asked to share their work with others and not just their immediate instructor or advisor. This hands-on session will examine both how educators can support learners in their role as active participants in their learning and the university's intellectual output. It will explore case studies from courses and open educational projects at UBC that asked learners to not only be students but also scholars, creators, authors, researchers, designers, authors, and problem solvers.

Building Digital Literacies: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

Session Description

Wikipedia-based assignments can engage students in an authentic learning experience that involves open collaboration, critical thinking, and knowledge building for a global audience. When students write or edit in wikipedia, they are not using the same format or skills that they would in writing a research paper or persuasive essay – they are applying new strategies to produce knowledge that people will use in the real world and they are building digital literacies. Wikipedia assignments involve fact-based writing skills where students engage with communities other than peers in a classroom, open their ideas up to public scrutiny, and evaluate, create and communicate information in new ways.

Wikipedia assignments are the most successful when the instructor is experienced at editing Wikipedia. This hands-on edit-a-thon will cover the basics of Wikipedia editing and will involve adding citations and new content to Wikipedia.

Finding, Using, and Remixing Open Resources For Your Courses

This presentation is CC-BY-SA; so you can download the presentation for your own use.

Session Description

As you prepare for your courses, chances are you may want to incorporate educational resources such as images, videos or quiz questions from different sources into your own materials. There are millions of openly licensed resources, from full courses and textbooks to tests banks and images, that are available for others to freely use. These resources can be modified and adapted to be more useful for your own teaching or learning context. Additionally, these open education resources support the greater worldwide education community by sharing teaching work which may not be as visible as other academic engagement activities.

Are you interested in learning how to find, use, and remix open education resources? Would you like to learn more about how to share resources back to the education community? This session is intended to address common questions concerning openly licensed materials for teaching and learning. Some of these questions include:

What is meant by Creative Commons?
How do you find and evaluate open resources?
What are the key considerations in reusing, reproducing, or modifying these materials?

With the proliferation of open education resources on the web, the practice of finding, evaluating, using, and remixing videos, simulations, test banks, presentations, and other materials is a skill that can help support instructors and students in their teaching and learning. This session will focus on the pragmatic elements of reuse and the basics of working with open education resources. Participants are invited to bring their questions, problems and favourite resources.

The Failure of Access: Rethinking Open Education

Session Description

Note: This 2017 Open Education Week event was a collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU), University of British Columbia (UBC), BCcampus, British Columbia Research Libraries Group (BCRLG) and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and took place on March 28, 2017.

There is little formal evidence that open education has an impact on increasing access to learning or making education more equitable; instead, the emerging picture is that open education has been largely embraced as a tool by those already privileged with access to education and learning resources.

The use of open re-use licenses and Internet technologies have long promised to reduce barriers to education by making it more distributed, equitable, and open. Indeed, the promise of open education can trace its roots to the the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations 1948, which states “everyone has a right to education.” The seminal 2007 Cape Town Open Education Declaration underscores and goes beyond this promise by declaring that open education and the use of OER contribute “to making education more accessible, especially where money for learning materials is scarce. They also nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, creating, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need.” The 2012 UNESCO Paris OER Declaration recommends that governments “promote and use OER to widen access to education at all levels, both formal and non-formal, in a perspective of lifelong learning, thus contributing to social inclusion, gender equity and special needs education.”

However, the question of who is benefiting from open education is still open. The OER Research Hub in their 2013-2014 Evidence Report found that over 65 percent of informal learners using OER had at least a college diploma, with over 20 percent having a postgraduate degree. These demographics echo the demographics of learners found the type of open access courses with the highest profile, MOOCs, where multiple studies have shown at least 80% of MOOC participants have a bachelor degree or higher. At least one Harvard professor has noted: “MOOCs aren’t digital keys to great classrooms’ doors. At best, they are infomercials for those classrooms. At worst, they are digital postcards from gated communities…More than a revolution, so far this movement reminds me of a different kind of disruption: colonialism.” Even for those privileged with access to higher education, open education does not seem to be impacting barriers related to cost; the rate of tuition at Canadian post secondary institutions has been increasing faster than the rate of inflation.

Is open education succeeding in being a transformative movement that makes learning more accessible? What are the criteria and successes that should be used to measure if the open education movement is a success? What more needs to be done? This panel will explore the goals, failures, and successes of open education.

As a collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU), University of British Columbia (UBC), BCcampus, British Columbia Research Libraries Group (BCRLG) and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), this event explored the goals, failures, and successes of open education.

Video Presentations

Keynote by Dr. Ishan Abeywardena, Commonwealth of Learning

Slides available here

Panel Discussion

Slides available here
Panelists included: Juan Pablo Alperin, Christina Hendricks, Jenna Omassi, and Tara Robertson

Open Practices: Teaching and Learning with Wikipedia Roundtable

Note: No slides were used in this session

Session Description

Wikipedia-based assignments can engage students in an authentic learning experience that involves open collaboration, critical thinking, and knowledge building for a global audience. When working with Wikipedia, students are asked to engage with communities other than their peers in a classroom, open their ideas up to public scrutiny, and evaluate, create and communicate information in new ways. When students write or edit in wikipedia, they are not using the same format or skills that they would in writing a research paper or persuasive essay – they are applying new strategies to produce knowledge that people will use in the real world and they are building digital literacies. In this discussion based session, a roundtable of UBC instructors who have integrated Wikipedia-based assignments into their courses will have a conversation and share practical knowledge about their assignment models, what worked, what challenges were encountered, what support they had or needed, and things they would do differently.

Open Scholarly Practice

This presentation is CC-BY; so you can download the presentation for your own use.

Session Description

"Open scholarship, which encompasses open access, open data, open educational resources, and all other forms of openness in the scholarly and research environment, is changing how knowledge is created and shared.” Association of Research Libraries Open Scholarship

In this session, we’ll explore ideas of scholarly practice in the digital age and how they can inform or be applied to teaching and learning. How has scholarly practice changed and what are the possibilities that open practices and platforms open up when students and faculty members become co-creators engaged in meaningful, generative work?

We’ll look at emerging practices at UBC that are engaging students as producers of knowledge using open platforms to align classroom spaces with scholarly practice.

Discussion Notes & Related Resources

Teaching With Wikipedia

This presentation is CC-BY-SA; so you can download the presentation for your own use.

Session Description

“Teaching with Wikipedia transforms a classroom’s boundaries. Every day, students write papers, translate articles, or share photos with their class. Wikipedia assignments transform that classroom into a global audience. Students learn, and then share that learning in their own words, for real readers.” Wikieducator

In this hands-on workshop we will share examples of instructors who are using Wikipedia in their classrooms at UBC, consider the value and constraints for using Wikipedia and more broadly explore authentic learning that changes the role of the student from a consumer to a producer of knowledge.

In this workshop we will engage in some “learning challenges” to help us explore different approaches for using Wikipedia in the classroom. We’ll discuss the spectrum of different approaches you can take to developing a Wikipedia assignment and explore some of challenges and constraints using this approach.

Notes and Related Resources

Documentation:Teaching_With_Wikipedia

Open Practices: Teaching and Learning with Wikipedia Roundtable

Note: No slides were used in this session

Session Description

Wikipedia-based assignments can engage students in an authentic learning experience that involves open collaboration, critical thinking, and knowledge building for a global audience. When working with Wikipedia, students are asked to engage with communities other than their peers in a classroom, open their ideas up to public scrutiny, and evaluate, create and communicate information in new ways. When students write or edit in wikipedia, they are not using the same format or skills that they would in writing a research paper or persuasive essay – they are applying new strategies to produce knowledge that people will use in the real world and they are building digital literacies. In this discussion based session, a roundtable of UBC instructors who have integrated Wikipedia-based assignments into their courses will have a conversation and share practical knowledge about their assignment models, what worked, what challenges were encountered, what support they had or needed, and things they would do differently.

Teaching in the Open

This presentation is CC-BY-SA; so you can download the presentation for your own use.

Session Description

Teaching in the open is a way to engage learners with the wider community, give them authentic practice and move beyond “disposable assignments.” Open teaching at UBC ranges from students creating learning objects to share with future classes and the public (using various media), to students editing and creating articles for Wikipedia. These rich learning experiences can offer faculty, students and staff new ways of approaching their teaching and learning and offer a different way of conceptualizing the role of the learner in the production of knowledge. Through open teaching and learning, students have the opportunity to contribute to a body of knowledge rather just consumers of information. Would you like explore teaching in the open in your class? Are you interested in sharing your experience and learning different approaches to open teaching? Do you want to meet faculty, staff and students who teach in the open?

Using and Remixing Open Resources in Your Courses

This presentation is CC-BY-SA; so you can download the presentation for your own use.

Session Description

For students, open educational resources are becoming a core way by which they supplement their coursework. With the proliferation of open education resources on the web, the practice of finding videos, simulations, test banks, and presentations to make clear complex subjects is simply a part of the pathway a student takes to ensure understanding. Additionally, when introduced into a course, open education resources, such as open textbooks, make education more financially accessible. For faculty, OERs offers the opportunity to incorporate a greater range of tools for teaching without the need to develop them from scratch. These resources can then be modified and adapted to make useful for their own teaching context. Additionally, open education resources support the greater worldwide education community by sharing teaching work which may not be as visible as other academic engagement activities. Are you interested in learning how to find, use, and remix open education resources? Would you like to learn more about how to share open education resources back to the education community?

Exploring the Possibilities for Your Classroom

This presentation is CC-BY-SA; so you can download the presentation for your own use.

Session Description

Open practices are enabling faculty, staff and students at the University of British Columbia to open their classrooms, incorporate new resources and perspectives in their learning environments and contribute to their students’ learning beyond the classroom. Through open practices, learners can connect their work with authentic audiences rather than only engaging in what David Wiley calls “disposable assignments”–read by only a teacher or a T.A. and then disposed of, adding no further value to the world. Are you interested in learning more about how to find, curate and use open education resources? Would you like to engage learners in publishing their work and exchanging ideas with a broader community?

Engaging Students In Open Education

Session Description

Open Education Week Panel hosted at UBC Vancouver
Open education is a hot topic on post secondary campuses these days. This year UBC saw the #textbookbroke campaign led by the Alma Mater society – advocating for the use of open textbooks and open practices in the classroom to reduce costs for students; the adoption of open textbooks and resources in large multi section physics and math courses; and the continuing development of open teaching practices with Wikipedia projects and student produced, openly published content.

How do we engage students with open educational practices that go beyond making their work public to making it re-usable or available for others to build on? Why is open education important to students and to what extent can it enrich the teaching and learning environment?

Speakers:

Christina Hendricks: Senior Instructor Philosophy
Jenna Omassi: VP Academic & University Affairs
Arthur Gil Green Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Geography, BC Campus Faculty Fellow
Derek Turner Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Geography
Rajiv Jhangiani, Psychology Instructor, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Leah Keshet, Mathematics Professor
Eric Cytrynbaum, Associate Professor Department of Mathematics
Stefan Reinsberg, Physics instructor at UBC

Hanging with the Pack - The Power of the Group in Creating an Open Community

Session Description

Festival of Learning Conference Presentation
What can a Librarian, a Philosopher, 2 students and 2 ed-tech/learning designer types do together? Lots! Here’s a sample:

Develop resources for faculty and students to learn about open - open.ubc.ca (coming soon)
Open challenge bank to support faculty development
Video interviews to share stories of open practice on campus
Open Case Studies on Sustainability (project in process)
Teaching with WordPress (experimental cMOOC for faculty development)

Let’s talk about the benefits of serial collaboration and “pack work” - trust, shortcuts, deep conversations (and not-so-deep), online collaboration, etc. - oh yeah, and show some examples of works in progress.

Case Studies on the Student as Producer

Session Description

Open Education Conference Presentation
The student as producer pedagogical model emphasizes the role of the student as collaborators in the production of knowledge. In this model, the university's approaches to learning and research are closer aligned; for example, students, similar to researchers, are asked to share their work beyond the walls of the classroom and not just with their immediate instructor or advisor. This session examined how educators, through the embrace of open pedagogies, can support learners in their role as active participants in both their learning and their institution's intellectual output. It explored case studies from multiple open courses, assignments, and projects at the University of British Columbia and other institutions that asked learners to not only be students but also creators, authors, researchers, performers, instructors, scholars, designers, and problem solvers. The session provided an in-depth discussion on the how choices around accessible curriculum, remixable content, and extendible technologies can impact student abilities to fully participate and engage as equals in their learning. It also explored best practices for how institutions can establish sustainable frameworks that support emerging pedagogical practices, open education initiatives, and modern web trends, such as open badges, leading to authentic learning experiences that empower students.

Hands-On Learning: The role of Maker Culture in Innovative Pedagogy

Session Description

In a report, the Open University described maker culture as an innovative pedagogy that emphasizes informal, networked, peer led, and shared learning motivated by fun and self-fulfilment. Likewise, Audrey Watters, an education technologist, states that maker culture involves “educational practices that we know work well: small group discussion, collaboration, participatory, project-based, and peer-to-peer learning, experimentation, inquiry, curiosity, play.” Universities, including some in British Columbia, are beginning to experiment with maker culture and are building spaces where students can informally share resources and knowledge, work on projects, network, and experiment with tools and technologies. This session will explore how the embracement of maker culture can support formal learning outcomes. It will examine specific case studies of maker culture in higher education and open a dialogue through audience participation and brainstorming.

Engaging Students with Open Educational Resources

This presentation is CC-BY; so you can download the presentation for your own use.

Session Description

Open educational resources are educational materials (text, video, audio, and more) that are licensed to allow others to reuse, revise, remix, redistribute, and retain them free of cost. In this session we will discuss various kinds of open educational resources, including open textbooks, how to find OER for your courses, and the pedagogical benefits of creating and using OER in your teaching.

Can I (Re)Use This? Working with Open Educational Resources

Session Description

If you are preparing resources for your teaching, from PowerPoint slides to online modules, chances are you’ll want to incorporate readings, images, video clips, problem sets, or other materials from different sources. This session will focus on the pragmatic elements of reuse and the basics of working with open educational resources . Such openly-licensed resources can impact teaching and learning through contextualization, time savings, and lowering student access barriers such as costs.

CTLT Staff: Open Learning Workshop

Session Description

This was an opportunity to open up discussion with our colleagues about what openness actually requires in practice. We challenge the notion that open equals free.

Facilitator Notes