BCcampus Excellence in Open Education Award: Lindsay Tripp

The newest recipient of the BCcampus Award for Excellence in Open Education is Lindsay Tripp, Copyright Librarian, Langara College. Lindsay is the chair-elect of the BC Open Education Librarians and the co-chair of Open Langara. She has been a tireless advocate for open education at Langara and essential in establishing Langara’s open textbook adoption tracking procedures.

Nominated by Lauri Aesoph, Manager, Open Education, BCcampus

Lindsay served as planning team lead for BCOEL’s 2019 Open Access Week event, Can we decolonize open? In addition to her open education work, she serves as the library’s liaison to the Aboriginal Studies and Indigenous Education and Services departments. In her spare moments, she has been learning about what it means to be an authentic ally in reconciliation. For this reason, the event was close to her heart and one she’s particularly proud of.

In recent months, she has focused time and energy on refining Langara’s open textbook adoption tracking processes. Lindsay has been instrumental in running the ongoing adoption program for Langara and sharing this data with BCcampus OpenEd in order to keep the provincial numbers current. Over the summer of 2019, Lindsay began visualizing Langara’s open textbook stats in Tableau and embedded the visualization into the college’s new Open Education website homepage. Lindsay thinks that visualizing their open textbook stats has really helped Langara to communicate the impact of open education at their institution.

Under Lindsay’s direction, the Langara Open Education Working Group instituted an open textbook review program that doubled BCcampus’ $250 honorarium for reviewers. This program solicited over 20 open textbook reviews from Langara instructors in the past year.

Currently, Lindsay and her colleague Julian Prior are in the midst of writing up the results of qualitative research they conducted regarding the impact of open textbooks on international students’ academic success.

Notable quotes

“In the past few years, as co-chair for Open Langara, Lindsay has used her drive and dedication not only to spur a rise in adoptions, but also to support faculty in their efforts to adapt and create open textbooks. She has advocated for resources to support faculty wanting to incorporate open ancillary materials and open pedagogy into their practice. Lindsay has been creative, energetic, and instrumental in leading activities encouraging and celebrating Langara’s Growing Open movement.”
Patricia Cia, MLS, FSLA, Director of Academic Innovation, Library & Learning Commons, Langara College

“I have had the privilege of working with Lindsay since 2016 when we first kicked around the idea of creating a working group advocating for open education at Langara. Four years and many meetings (and coffees!) later, Langara now has an established Open Education Advisory Committee and is the heaviest user of open textbooks amongst post-secondary educational institutions in B.C. Even though I’m sure she would deny it, this impressive achievement is mainly due to Lindsay’s tireless work advocating for open in so many different ways at the college, and is all the more remarkable when you think that most of this work has been done off of the side of Lindsay’s desk (her main role is copyright librarian). This is testimony to Lindsay’s passion and commitment towards equality, justice, and accessibility in education, values which are so important to our work in the open space. The icing on the cake for me is that Lindsay happens to also be just a fantastic person to work with. I am absolutely delighted that she has been given this important award, as it is fully deserved.”
Julian Prior, Chair of Educational Technology, Langara College