Reclaiming the Open Learning Environment

The delivery of open online learning has become a more common practice (or at least a more desired practice) in higher education in recent years. In this session, two diverse universities will share their lessons learned in delivering open learning.

UBC has long embraced open learning projects through a robust WordPress and MediaWiki 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).

This session will examine how institutions and instructors can provide open educational experiences and develop the required expertise, capacity and support systems. The co-faciliators of this session will identify sharable and extensible tools, approaches and means of cooperation that will allow educators and learners to shape their open learning experiences.


Speaker Bios:

Brian Lamb is the Director of Innovation Open Learning at Thompson Rivers University (TRU). Brian moved on to TRU after more than a decade with UBC’s Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, where he was a Strategist contributing to a wide range of new media, open education and sustainability education initiatives. He founded some of the earliest campus services for blogs and wikis in higher education. He’s been a Research Fellow at Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL), and a Visiting Researcher at Barcelona’s Open University of Catalonia. He mutters ill-tempered observations on his weblog: http://abject.ca/

Jon Festinger, Q.C. is a Vancouver, British Columbia based counsel and educator. A Faculty member at the Centre for Digital Media (http://thecdm.ca) Jon teaches Video Game Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia (http://videogame.law.ubc.ca) where he has now taught as an Adjunct Professor for two decades, is the author of the first edition of “Video Game Law” published by LexisNexis in 2005, and co-author of the 2nd Edition published in 2012(http://www.lexisnexis.com/store/ca/catalog/booktemplate/productdetail.jsp?prodId=prd-cad-01004). As a graduate of McGill University’s Faculty of Law, Jon began his legal career in private practice, in turn becoming General Counsel of WIC Western International Communication, Senior Vice President of the CTV Television Network and Executive Vice President, Business & General Counsel of the Vancouver Canucks. Jon practices law through Festinger Law & Strategy.

Will Engle is a strategist at UBC’s Centre for Teaching, Learning & Technology. Will is engaged with open education initiatives that are leveraging emerging technologies, approaches, and pedagogies to support flexible and open learning. With a background in library science, Will is interested in understanding and supporting the removal of barriers that limit access to education, information, and knowledge. He occasional posts at http://blogs.ubc.ca/open or @infology on twitter.

Location: Dodson Room, Level Three

This is part of the Open UBC series of events, celebrating International Open Access Week and Celebrate Learning Week at UBC. For more information visit the Open UBC website.