many post-secondary education stakeholders are considering how to apply them in B.C. As the name suggests, micro-credentials are small credentials that are uniquely focused on meeting competency needs in industry. One factor of their success is that education, industry, and students work together to ensure applicability. Often the first step of applying an innovation like micro-credentials is to understand it better. Whether you work in post-secondary education or industry or are a student, join us to learn more. In this primarily asynchronous course, we will discuss the basics of micro-credentials, best practices from other regions, and stakeholder perspectives, and we’ll have a group discussion to discover at least one feasible application of micro-credentials in our province. We will also host two synchronous web-conference sessions, which will be recorded. Based on feedback from a previous offering, we lengthened this course from 5 to 12 days. This reduces the barrier of time and makes it easier to participate. Expect to spend 6 to 13 hours asynchronously over the 12-day period. The optional synchronous sessions will be held via Zoom on Thursday, March 4, and Thursday, March 11, both at noon Pacific standard time. This event is free. To ensure we have an inclusive and welcoming environment for all, we’ve added registration to our online office sessions. Registration is now closed. This notice is to inform you that this session will be recorded, archived, and made available publicly on BCcampus.ca. By participating in this session, you acknowledge that your participation in this session will be recorded and the recording will be made available openly. 
Who is this for?
The challenge series is open to anyone but has been designed for educators who are new to open education. You might have heard about OER, open textbooks, and perhaps even open pedagogy but if you don’t know where to find them or how to use or create them, then this is for you. This isn’t a bootcamp or a crash course in open education, it’s more of a tasting buffet of appetizers, designed to allow even the most time-constrained educators to participate.
What can I expect?
When you sign up for the series you complete a few questions about your knowledge of open education. Each day you will receive an email with a link for the two daily challenges and a recap of the previous day’s challenges. It will be labelled OE Challenge Series, so be sure to make sure it doesn’t end up in your junk folder. All challenges and recaps will also be posted on this website. You will share your response to the challenges in the comments section of each challenge that will be moderated by the OE Challenge hosts.
Invite your colleagues to participate with you! It’s a great way to learn about OEP together!
Can I sign up even if I’m not new to open?
Register now!
Registration remains open throughout the series – join in on the fun anytime!
Your hosts for this series
Carolee Clyne
Josie Gray
Clint Lalonde
Krista Lambert
Melanie Meyers
In this session, Amanda Coolidge will walk participants through the what, why, and how of open educational resources. She will share issues of access and affordability, as well as equitable design principles that lay the foundations for open practice. Further, she will highlight the digital inequities that have surfaced and heightened as a result of the pandemic and how open practices can help to alleviate those inequities. In addition, Amanda will share examples of open educational practices in the post-secondary environment.
Amanda Coolidge is an uninvited settler on the Esquimalt and Songhees Nation of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) Speaking Peoples. She is the director of open education at BCcampus in British Columbia, Canada. From open textbooks to open pedagogy, she leads the province’s initiatives in open education with a team of nine other people, who work across British Columbia to enhance access for students. Amanda has a master’s degree in educational technology and many years of experience as an instructional designer at various universities across Canada. She has worked in open education in Calgary, Alberta; Nairobi, Kenya; and British Columbia. When Amanda is not at work, she can often be found on the beaches and in the woods of British Columbia, travelling with her family in their 32-foot fifth-wheel RV. Amanda lives in the RV with her husband and son seven months of the year, enjoying everything about the outdoors and the opportunity to explore across North America.
Register now!
Have an idea for creating an Open Educational Resource (OER) with no idea how to start? Have you started an OER project and have stopped making progress? Feeling overwhelmed at the size of the OER project that you have begun? Whether you are considering developing an OER project, or about to embark on one, this session will introduce you to the various supports provided by UBC to help you move your OER forward at any stage of your project.
This session will cover tools, resources, and supports to:
- Plan your OER project
- Find OERs for use in teaching, or to adapt or enhance your project
- Create your own OER, and
- Share your project once it is complete.
Register now!
Join Christine Miller for an introduction to H5P, which can be used to create interactive content, including videos, presentations, quizzes, timelines, and more.
This event is organized by the BC Open Education Librarians (BCOEL) group with sponsorship from BCcampus, Capilano University, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Langara College, and the University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan campus.
Save the date! On March 1, please join us for this Open Education Week event to explore wicked problems and open remedies. A wicked problem is one that is difficult or impossible to solve due to incomplete, contradictory, interconnected, or changing factors. A problem that requires a major change in practice, belief, or behaviour for many people is often a wicked problem. Drawing on this idea, we turn our attention to the wicked problem in higher education of empowering students in the classroom and centring student voices in exploring the challenges of and potential solutions for this problem. Arley Cruthers (Kwantlen) will moderate the session. Student panelists include Kristen Morgan (UBC Okanagan), Sophia Nguyen (Simon Fraser University [SFU]), and Caitlin Spreeuw (Douglas College). Open Education Week (March 1–5, 2021) is an annual global event that aims to “raise awareness and showcase the impact of open education on teaching and learning worldwide.”
Facilitator Info:
Arley Cruthers is a Paralympic medalist, novelist, and writing instructor. She won two World Championship gold medals and a bronze medal at the Athens 2004 Paralympic Games. She received accolades for both her novels, Post and The Time We All Went Marching, and she’s also the author of OER Business Writing for Everyone: An Inclusive Guide to Writing in the Workplace. She teaches applied communications at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, where she also currently serves as the Open Education Teaching Fellow. Arley is passionate about open education, open pedagogy, ungrading, Universal Design for Learning, and disability justice. She holds a master of fine arts from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Kristen Morgan is a physics and math student at UBC Okanagan, where she works in the library as the open education assistant and serves as a senator-at-large. She is passionate about the intersection of policy and advocacy, especially as they relate to sustainable long-term institutional changes. Kristen’s latest policy work addresses the prevalence of fee-based digital assessment tools (pay-to-play online homework systems) in the undergraduate student experience and reimagines assessment activities in an increasingly online environment. You can find Kristen on Twitter @KrisTheMorg.
Sophia Nguyen is a third-year business student at SFU who is passionate about creating positive community impact through entrepreneurship. She is a corporate relations coordinator for the SFU Student Marketing Association and an ambassador for Female Laboratory of Innovative Knowledge, a platform dedicated to helping women gain valuable work experience and enrich their professional networks. Sophia’s latest project is a children’s book called Jordan and the Magic Cape, created in collaboration at the Make Change Studio. This book is designed to educate children on the wicked problem of textile sustainability in a creative and impactful way.
Caitlin Spreeuw is a science student currently studying at Douglas College with hopes of transferring to SFU. She is the director of external relations at the Douglas Students’ Union, and through this role, she has had the opportunity to be a part of the Open Douglas working group. Caitlin is interested in open education because of its potential to save students a lot of money in the long run and help relieve the increasingly heavy financial burden of post-secondary education.
Open Education Week (March 1–5, 2021) is an annual, global event that aims to “raise awareness and showcase the impact of open education on teaching and learning worldwide.”
This event is free. To ensure we have an inclusive and welcoming environment for all, we’ve added registration to this event.
Register now!
This notice is to inform you that this session will be recorded, archived, and made available publicly on BCcampus.ca. By participating in this session, you acknowledge that your participation in this session will be recorded and the recording will be made available openly.
Join TRU for a show-and-tell session featuring TRU campus and Open Learning faculty members sharing their experience with open textbooks to enhance teaching and learning across a wide variety of subjects and the lessons they have learned.
Faculty across B.C. have access to tremendous support and opportunities to engage in open education. If you’re curious about open education research, this session is for you. In this session, you’ll hear from one instructor who is completing a research study on the perceptions of faculty and students towards open pedagogy. Learn more about her project and gain tips and advice to help launch your own research project.
Register now!
In March of 2020, we presented a talk at Open Ed Week where we endeavoured to “explore the present state of digital learning and discuss ways to better understand and respond to these [data privacy] practices.” A handful of days later, the campus closed and we moved to fully remote instruction. This talk revisits our arguments of a year ago in the wake of a teaching and learning moment where issues of privacy and data stewardship have often taken a backseat to the urgent needs of the crisis. What do the new trends in education mean for our data, our privacy, and our future — as learners, as educators, and as digital citizens? Let’s explore together.
Would you like to learn more about open education and open educational resources but don’t know where to start? This introductory workshop is for you.
This session will provide an overview to the open education movement including what it is and why it matters. This session will cover:
- Definition and examples of open educational resources
- Benefits of OER to both students and faculty
- First steps toward adopting, adapting, or creating OER
- How to find additional support with OE at UBC Library