Open Education 2013

The delivery of open online learning has become a more common practice (or desired practice) in higher education in recent years. In many cases, the desire of an institution or an instructor to provide open educational experiences is not matched by the expertise and capacity available to support them. In this session, two diverse universities will share their lessons learned and ongoing challenges in delivering "xMOOCs", "cMOOCs" and open learning approaches that defy that distinction. The objective is to identify sharable and extensible tools, approaches and means of cooperation that will allow educators and learners to shape these experiences.

Last spring, The University of British Columbia (UBC) launched a research-informed xMOOC pilot through the Coursera consortium, with sign-ups for some of the pilot courses reaching six figures. At the same time, UBC has long embraced open learning projects through a robust MediaWiki and WordPress publishing framework that helped advance a broad range of open educational activities, including student produced OER and open courses. UBC?s embrace of both a self-maintained open infrastructure as well as emerging third party platforms is creating new potentials for open education at UBC.

Meanwhile Thompson Rivers University (TRU) has an ?Open Learning? division with a long history of providing open access post-secondary distance education (online and print) by offering continuous enrolment, flexible scheduling and minimal admission requirements, as well as extensive capacity for Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR) and a well-established transfer credit system. It is working to enhance its capacity to support learning and public engagement via open platforms as well, via alignment with the Open Educational Resources university (OERu) and by working with UBC to adapt its MediaWiki and WordPress framework for its own needs. It is also piloting open online courses based on the distributed/syndicated framework modeled by #DS106, #ETMOOC, among others.

The co-facilitators of this session assert that it is vital for educators to be meaningful in their intentions for open learning environments, or risk have having their intentions shaped by others. In addition to discussing their lessons learned, this session hopes to prompt a discussion on the enhanced cooperation that is needed -- whether it be by formal ?shared services? arrangements supported by organizations such as BCcampus, or by more emergent forms of sharing such as an open platform co-op.