“Everyone here will walk away knowing me as ‘that person who spoke with David Wiley,’” said Kim Thanos (to laughter from the crowd) at the Open Textbooks Summit in April, acknowledging the reputation of her co-presenter and business partner, David Wiley, as a giant in the OER world. There is a direct relationship between textbook costs and student success – and Thanos and Wiley of… Read more »
Making open textbooks available to the B.C. Higher education system is our mandate – but getting educators to use them is the other side of the project. That’s why we have created a toolkit for use by Teaching and Learning Centres, librarians, instructors, and anyone who wants to advocate for the adoption of open textbooks in higher education. While it’s true we can provide a… Read more »
From Video Game Law, Arts One Digital, to MOOCs, it seems that there are many UBC faculty who are using technology-enhanced learning in some form or another to enhance their teaching. And, at UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, it was Novak Rogic, whom we interviewed in early April, who first introduced us to the term: Flexible Learning. According to UBC, much of the… Read more »
Professor Larsen at the University of California at Davis started the ChemWiki in 2008 on a shoestring. “ChemWiki is not a textbook,” says Larsen, “it is a textbook environment capable of supporting multiple chemistry textbooks within a centralized system.” Recently, ChemWiki received a grant of $250,000 from the National Science Foundation to a consortium that includes Sonoma State University, Diablo Valley College, Contra Costa Community… Read more »
** Cross posted from the BCcampus website ** Phase 3 of the BCcampus Open Textbook Program is well underway and we are on target for a fall 2014 reveal, just in time for back-to-school. In early June, we are hosting an open textbook sprint over 4 days in Vancouver where we will be co-creating a First-year regional Geography textbook with six geography faculty from across… Read more »
Last Friday (May 9th) a dozen librarians gathered for a hackfest at SFU Harbour Centre. Our goal: to work collectively for the day on an OER project we were keen to get done. Participants were a mix of librarians from the recently formed BCOER group, a grassroots group of BC postsecondary librarians interested in OER, as well as, a cadre of talented and energetic UBC Library school… Read more »
Phase 3 of the BCcampus Open Textbook Program is well underway and we are on target for a fall 2014 reveal, just in time for back-to-school. In early June, we are hosting an open textbook sprint over 4 days in Vancouver where we will be co-creating a First-year regional Geography textbook with six geography faculty from across the province. This open textbook sprint is directly… Read more »
If you build it, they may not come. Therefore, a secret to success for a Teaching and Learning, Centre, says Stephanie Chu, is to embed its work within multiple areas of a post-secondary institution, to be proactive and develop relationships, and provide complementary expertise. Chu is the Director of Simon Fraser University’s Teaching and Learning Centre, which falls directly under the purview of the vice-president,… Read more »
Learning, Teaching and Educational Technology Leadership Summit BCcampus has invited leaders in teaching and learning centres to a one day Learning, Teaching and Educational Technology Leadership Summit. Recently, BCcampus has been in conversation with a number of the leaders in B.C. Teaching, Learning and Educational Technology Centres. Those conversations have focused on finding ways of collaborating, knowledge and resource sharing, co-hosting SOTL and other faculty development events…. Read more »
I’m doing a workshop on open education at UBC in June, and another at the American Association of Philosophy Teacher’s conference in July. Here’s a teaching kit for the UBC workshop I made with Mozilla Thimble by remixing another teaching kit. I know a fair bit about why I think being more open in teaching […]