5 Questions with Gina Bennett, eLearning specialist and open education advocate

Gina Bennett coordinates all aspects of distance learning for the College of the Rockies including orienting new faculty to the online learning environment, providing student and faculty support, and evaluating new technologies for educational application.

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What do you do at College of the Rockies?

I’ve been a faculty member at the College for 16 years. Our small college allows me to wear many different hats. My business card says “eLearning Specialist.” While I coordinate distance-learning activities for the college, I spend a lot of my time in program development, instructional design, and curriculum renewal. I also participate in international projects whenever I can.

How does the College and by extension your Education Technology Centre support Open initiatives?

We don’t have any large, formal Open initiatives underway. However, we do have a number of individuals who are interested in various aspects of openness and are willing to try a few things.

Our Education Technology Centre tries to include a Creative Commons (CC-BY footer) on every how-to resource we create.  Several faculty members have also put a CC license on some of their presentations and other learning support materials.

We had an instructor last semester seek out and choose an open textbook for his class. And, as a result, I’ve had several more instructors ask me to research open texts that might be available for their courses.

Why is open education important to you?

I first became interested in the world of ‘Open’ about 15 years ago when I discovered Linux. But, it’s my international consultancy work that has really brought the mission for Open Education into focus for me.

It’s only when you have the opportunity to travel to a small, dusty college in the interior of Tanzania and work with the incredibly intelligent and dedicated staff; and, meet enthusiastic, motivated students that you realize that the only thing holding many people back from realizing the full potential of education is the lack of access to resources.

Open access to textbooks and learning materials won’t solve all the resource problems but it’s a powerful and just start.

In honour of Open Education Week, can you share how Open is changing higher-ed? What is your vision of the future?

I believe the main contribution of the Open Education movement is its opening of the dialogue among educators about who the educational system privileges and who it excludes. We’re just starting to talk about all that.

Once Open becomes the default, I can imagine an educational institution with freely available courses, in which all content, lectures are MOOC-ed and all supported by Open textbooks.

I envision faculty actively involved in upgrading and customizing texts for the best possible learning experience. I see a strong international community where we share learning support documents and materials. This includes using Open data whenever possible/ethically appropriate, systems built on software choices that are by default open source, unless other factors require something proprietary.

And after that – a system that goes beyond being just (passively) Open to being (actively) Inclusive: finding, promoting and funding ways to bring in the excluded, the marginalized into a community of learners.

For those interested in learning more, what can you recommend?

For a short and practical explanation of why open access to research is the way to go, I love this blog post “Open Access: six myths to put to rest.”

If you’re looking for something a bit more philosophical, I created this presentation (March 2014) for an ETUG event, attempting to explain why I think Border Pedagogy is the signature pedagogy for the Open Education movement.

Notable Quotes:

It’s only when you have the opportunity to travel to a small, dusty college in the interior of Tanzania and work with the incredibly intelligent and dedicated staff; and, meet enthusiastic, motivated students that you realize that the only thing holding many people back from realizing the full potential of education is the lack of access to resources.

Open access to textbooks and learning materials won’t solve all the resource problems but it’s a powerful and just start.

I believe the main contribution of the Open Education movement is the dialogue among educators about who the educational system privileges and who it excludes. We’re just starting to talk about.

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