Congrats to Mary Burgess, Leva Lee, Clint Lalonde and Christy Foote of our BCcampus staff for their stellar organization of the BC Open Textbook Summit that was conducted on April 8 and 9 at the SFU Wosk Centre for Dialogue in Vancouver.
The summit brought together participants from Alberta, BC, California, DC, Minnesota, Ontario, Rhode Island, South Africa, Texas, Utah and Washington. All the open textbook project leaders from North America were in attendance, along with the Siyavula project from South Africa. Student leaders from both Canadian and US organizations were prominent in the lively and productive discussions that were expertly facilitated by Paul Stacey of Creative Commons (CC). Cable Green, CC’s Director of Global Learning kept us focused on outcomes throughout the discussions.
Summit participants represented:
- Alberta Enterprise & Advanced Education
- BC Ministry of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology (AEIT)
- BCcampus
- Canadian Alliance of Student Associations
- Creative Commons
- eCampusAlberta
- LumenLearning (virtually)
- Open Course Library
- Open Courseware Consortium
- OpenStax College
- Right to Research Coalition – SPARC
- Student Public Interest Research Groups
- Siyavula
- Twenty Million Minds Foundation
- University of Minnesota
From the discussions, it was clear there is a willingness to partner and support one another, as well as the potential for the creation of a “Federation” of open courseware and textbook projects to insure that we get broad coverage of subjects, and minimize duplication of effort.
The other welcome outcome from the summit was the potential to use a common technical platform for authoring, remixing, storage, publishing and distribution. This will be big news when we have more to show and tell.
Our BCcampus team was congratulated by the summit participants for the process it has used to build towards an open textbook program for British Columbia. We are seen as part of a leadership network of open projects in North America. We in turn very much value the collaborative spirit of the emerging federation and the willingness of participants to share open models, policies and practices.