Coming Together for Open Education

Join us for an enlightening panel discussion where educators will share their firsthand experiences and insights into creating open textbooks. This session aims to delve into innovative processes, challenges, and triumphs. 

A presentation on the absolute basics. What exactly is an “open” resource and how is it different from “free”? What exactly are Creative Commons licences? What is the significance and impact of Creative Commons licences on teaching and learning? 

Learning outcomes:

• Define “open” materials as distinct from “free”

• Recognize the set of Creative Commons licences and their meaning

• Describe how CC licences enable educators and learners to interact with and learn from existing materials in more flexible ways than traditional materials

Discover the essentials of creating Open Educational Resources (OER) in Pressbooks from students and graduates working in the OER Lab at Centennial College! In this workshop, we will introduce you to the Pressbooks platform, demonstrate how to enrich your content with multimedia, and customize it to your learners. Learn about the possibilities and limitations of Pressbooks, including formatting, design, and accessibility. Gain insights into the advantages and potential challenges of OER creation, and join the conversation in our Q&A session to clarify any doubts. Perfect for educators and content creators looking to expand their digital horizons!

What’s the difference between traditional and open textbook publishing? Educational publisher Jeremy Lucyk takes you behind the scenes to examine development and production processes for both traditional and open texts. We will examine some of the key differences, challenges, and opportunities offered by open. In discussing where established norms can inform innovation, we will point towards best practices, and optimal results for educators, learners, and institutions.

• Traditional Publishing Processes: A Brief Introduction

• Open Publishing Processes: Challenges to Creating OER

  • Content (Text, Imagery, Ancillaries, & Copyright)

  • Design & Production

  • Funding & Planning

  • Feedback & Revisions

• Towards OER Best Practices

Not sure what “OER” even means? Think it’s just another buzz word? Unsure where to start? This session is the right place for you! A perfect introduction for the uninitiated and a great refresher for the out-of-practice, this presentation will cover the founding principles of “open,” creative commons licensing, open repositories and more. 

Learning Outcomes

• Apply the basics of open licensing to OER identification and creation

• Comprehend the foundational principles of open pedagogy

In this introductory workshop into open pedagogy, we will begin by exploring the idea of renewable assessments. Renewable assessments are an interesting way to engage students in work that lives beyond the course as opposed to a "disposable" assignment which is thrown out after it has been graded. Renewable assessment is one method through which we can begin to integrate open pedagogy into our classrooms, a pedagogical practice which invites learners to take the driver's seat to their own learning. If you're interested in exploring new methods of how to engage your students, join us in this discussion on open pedagogy and renewable assessments! 

Want to take your Pressbooks OERs a little further? This session will explore some easy ways that you can improve both accessibility AND the quality of PDF exports to improve student experience with your OER. We will dive into the HTML/code view and explore some tweaks to CSS files.

March 7, 2024

7:00 - 8:00 PM

Beckie Berlasty, St Clair College

Join us in MS Teams for a 1-hour interactive webinar on eCampus Ontario’s H5P Studio.  We will work through creating an H5P object from scratch (Drag and Drop), as well as how to modify an existing tool (Documentation Tool).

Please come prepared with an H5P Studio account prior to joining the session.

March 8, 2024

2:00 - 3:30 PM

Ann Gagné, George Brown College

Griffin Epstein, George Brown College

Kate Klein, George Brown College

Fran Odette, George Brown College

Jen Porter, George Brown College

Ellen Flanagan, George Brown College

Elizabeth Gowan, George Brown College

This panel and workshop event will be open to all College Ontario instructors. It will consist of a panel of 2-3 participants who will discuss the role of advocacy as part of open course design and curriculum. The panel will emphasize the sustainability of the assessments as designed especially around the impact that they have on community work, creating a reciprocal exchange between course, program, and community. The panel will be 30-40 minutes.

This will be followed by a discussion facilitated by the group/event leads and organizers about how these sustainable assessments are part of an open pedagogical practice that can be applicable to many disciplines and courses across Ontario colleges.

The final 30 minutes will be a workshop and discussion on how advocacy and justice centred movements can be built into the courses that the workshop participants teach and the kinds of Open Educational Resources (OER) that can be created and shared to advance advocacy, justice, and awareness. Movements like College Workers for Access will be highlighted as an example of grassroots organizing that can extend from college to college and course to course. The session will end with a discussion of the possibility of creating a collective CC BY licensed OER resource that highlights advocacy as open sustainable pedagogy, with lesson plans and activity ideas which could be shared through eCampusOntario open library to all stakeholders in the province and beyond to help support thinking around advocacy, accessible, justice and inclusion.

An asynchronous tutorial that outlines the basic concepts of OER, and discusses their importance to post-secondary education. 

An asynchronous tutorial that continues where our first tutorial “Why are OER? Why are they important?” left off. This tutorial instructs on how to identify OER from non-OER, so that users can easily adopt them for classroom use.