Lauri Aesoph, an original BCcampus employee, has retired from BCcampus. Since 2004, Lauri has served in many roles and positions with the organization, most recently serving as the Operations Manager with the Open Education Team.

As Operations Manager, Lauri was instrumental in developing many of our internal policies and procedures to support the various open education projects and initiatives over the years. Lauri also took a lead role in open education team communications, writing many of the open education blog posts, emails to various open education listservs, and BCcampus newsletter entries.

But her work with open education went beyond the boundaries of B.C. and the B.C. post-secondary system. As the author of much of the BCcampus open education support resources, Lauri’s work has been adopted and adapted by open education projects around the world. Her OER by Discipline directory is among one of the most visited and well-used resources in the BCcampus collection, and her work in adoption tracking at a time when very few open education projects around the world tracked adoption was groundbreaking and often emulated in the broader field of open education.

Lauri was an exceptional and thoughtful colleague who not only broke new paths in open education, but also never failed to pave those paths to make the journey easier and smoother for the next traveler. She was a fountain of BCcampus institutional and historical knowledge, and she often used her considerable wisdom to improve new open education initiatives and programs. One memorable initiative she brought to the team was in 2015 when we were a few years into the B.C. Open Textbook Project. That year, BCcampus hosted the global Open Education Conference in Vancouver, and Lauri suggested we use the opportunity to recognize the contributions of B.C. open textbook authors we had been working with. She organized a successful open textbook author appreciation event as a thank you for their contributions to the success of the open textbook project.

BCcampus, and especially the open education team, wish Lauri and her partner Chris many years of happiness in retirement, enjoying time in the garden, playing music, and life as grandmother to her grandchildren.