Open Education 2017

During 2017, the Year of Open moved quickly from simply being an avenue to recognize significant milestones for open education to becoming a year-long event to bring awareness to all things open.

The Year of Open became a global focus on open processes, systems, and tools, created through collaborative approaches, that enhance our education, businesses, governments, and organizations. At its core, open is a mindset about the way we should meet collective needs and address challenges. It means taking a participative and engaging approach, whether to education, government, business or other areas of daily life. In its practical applications, open is about shared efforts and values to enhance people's opportunities, understanding and experiences.

During the Year of Open, we have captured and displayed efforts to increase participation and understanding of how open contributes to making things better for everyone. In this session, I will discuss the results and share what's next for the Year of Open.

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

This session will explore how and why the global open education community can and should work with their national governments to mainstream open educational resources (OER) and open education practices (OEP) in support of solving the SDGs, our collective global grand challenges.

Why connect OER and OEP to the SDGs? (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, educators and students to solving SDGs; forming a new, positive connection between governments and their public education systems. (3) Global challenges / SDGs are constantly changing and OER and OEP can be updated in real time. (4) As learning spaces shift to OEP, 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.

I recently explored the OER + SDG4 connection at UNESCO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvfC8A1oW30 and I look forward to working with Open Education Conference participants to explore these ideas and opportunities more deeply.

Open education in British Columbia, Canada is thriving. From open textbooks to virtual reality tours of Stanley Park, the creation, adaptation, and adoption of open educational resources (OER) have skyrocketed since the launch of the B.C. Open Textbook Project in 2012. In 2016, the BCcampus Open Education team, with the support of the Hewlett Foundation, distributed grants to B.C. public post-secondary institutions to create, adapt, or adopt OER. The successful recipients of these grants included: the creation of student-driven subject specific case studies; creation of 3D videos to enhance trades education; creation of instructional videos to supplement open textbooks; student co-created virtual reality tours of B.C. geographical landmarks; the creation and implementation of the first OER protege program, a faculty development program dedicated to the creation and adaptation of OER; and the student-led adaptation of OpenStax's Principles of Microeconomics open textbook.

This presentation will showcase what is next for OER and Open education in B.C., highlighting the collaboration that has taken place across the institutions, the student-driven open educational resource development, and the innovative practices that have led to successful creation of OER.

Using multiple metaphors, Mary will take participants through the development of strategies and activities that BCcampus has used in our Open Education work. As an entity that exists to provide support to BC post-secondary institutions, BCcampus is operating very much within a diverse system mired by the many challenges of the current post-secondary landscape. Our positioning as system supporters who are also responsible for advancing that same system's teaching and learning practices enables us to help our constituents advance while also ensuring their basic needs are met. This focus on both current and future needs has driven our strategy on Open Textbooks and ultimately Open Education. While we have worked towards advancing other elements of Open Education besides textbooks, we think it's vital not to get too far ahead of those we are trying to help. While working on Open Pedagogy and Policy, we are also looping back to pick up faculty who are completely new to Open Education and need very basic support and guidance. Meeting people where they are is the only way we will truly make the shift to openness as the default.

This will be a presentation followed by a hopefully robust discussion of how to support those just starting out in Open Education while helping those who are further along continue to advance and innovate. Should we stop talking about Open Textbooks? If we do, how will we reach the majority of faculty who have not yet heard of OER?

The best offense is a good defense. While overused, this saying still rings true for Open Educational Resources. As the movement continues to gain national and international attention, it is more important than ever to communicate in ways that counter misinformation about OER. One of the best ways to do so is with clear and concise messages that are crafted for your specific audiences.

Join this hands-on messaging and media training to learn the best language and techniques. From K-12 to high ed, we have developed a clear, concise, and universal description of OER that applies across the board, as well as created stratified messages, backed by research, and tailored to resonate with the many OER stakeholders--students, teachers, administrators, professors, and policymakers.

Learn the best practices for using these messages effectively in your daily work, through earned and social media, hone your elevator pitch, practice for interviews, and master your response to frequently asked questions.

Every few years, a K-12 OER project will come along that contributes significantly to the body of resources that teachers can access. EngageNY was one such project; Open Up Resources is another. However, as with many resources in the commons, there are problems around stewardship and maintenance. This presentation/panel explores the duty of care for both the educators who use K-12 OER and the organizations that develop new OER/on the basis of existing OER. How do we work together to build on what has been built before, without losing the best of what came before? How do we iterate without losing coherence and rigor? What are the most impactful and high leverage changes to the curricular content to meet the needs of students not ready for grade level work? This presentation/panel explores the research, tools, processes, and marketing/outreach necessary to build a coherent K-12 OER landscape that best serves the needs of educators while creating a path to sustainability for curriculum developers.

Over the last two decades, the movement of opening up education and through the innovative educational use of the Internet, such as OER, OCW, and MOOC, has been flourishing around the world. By making educational tools, resources, and knowledge freely and openly accessible to learners and teachers around the world, the movement is beginning to radically change the cultures, values, systems, ecology, and economics of education. As social and economic systems are being more cross-regional and globalized, it is becoming increasingly critical and urgent for us to create new education systems that are able to flexibly respond to the rapidly changing social needs.

In addition to the ongoing open innovation movement, the emergence of AI applications in education, especially our rapidly increasing ability to analyze and utilize big data, provides us with enormous possibilities to better support more personalized and collaborative lifelong learning building upon the abundance of openly shared educational resources. Furthermore, some evolving pedagogical approaches such as gamification and project-based learning are helping promote and accelerate the acquisition of critical skill and knowledge both for individual and social needs.

This presentation addresses and discusses some of the emerging possibilities of how we can embrace the openness and innovation in education to help us continuously build the foundation and infrastructure for supporting more personalized, flexible, and on-demand learning as well as improving learning and teaching. It also examines some pioneer and exemplary efforts in inventing the next-generation education and explores how we can create an ecosystem that enables us to build necessary capacity for lifelong educational support. Finally, this presentation explores some of the future possibilities that will help further advance individual and collective learning c and education systems, both locally and globally, in the 21st century society.

Students often lose hope as they head out of academia and into a career. Why? I believe that they need to see more specific career development resources. Students become overwhelmed – if they are cognizant that getting assistance in their job search is beneficial, they may not know where to look, whose information to trust and how to synthesize it with their education. What if we were to create an OER repository for students that's generated by faculty and career development professionals within any college that focuses on resumes and cover letters for specific disciplines, specific jobs or broader career paths or unique industries? What if these tangible artifacts (OER) also teach intangible skills – professional etiquette, capacity for leadership, motivation, communication efficacy and the like – that employers seek?

This presentation will explore the integration of college career development professionals and faculty to create an internal OER repository specifically for career development resources with the goal of offering students combined career development perspectives within a familiar circuit they can trust. I will explore ways in which this initiative could happen as well as the benefits.

This could be what's next for OER in higher education.